The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  It was a festive atmosphere: the handsome men and women milled about, playing with the balloons, arguing over coffee brands and whether moving to Queens was a viable alternative to a social life.

  “What each of them wouldn’t do to get into Laszlo’s bunk,” Roberta said, while keeping one clammy hand upon Vladimir’s. She wore a manly herringbone suit and a transparent white shirt over a black bra of elaborate construction which brought out and augmented her meager bosom. Her hair had been tied back with little ribbons of silk, and her gaunt cheeks rouged. There was no mistaking her for a sixteen-year-old unless she opened her mouth and exposed her ironwork. “I,” she announced to Vladimir, pointing at her name tag, “am Katerina Nieholtz-Praga, scion of an old Austrian family, and wife of the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga. Al is getting his citizenship today, but purely for business purposes, you understand. His heart is still in Tuscany, with his olive farm, his two Arabians, and his mamma.”

  “God help us all,” Vladimir said. He sat, stooped and unshaven, in a huge sports jacket Roberta had brought for the occasion. He had tried shaving in the bathroom of his room in the squalid Astoria motor lodge, which he had procured with his remaining fifty dollars, but found that he couldn’t keep his hands steady or his face still.

  Laszlo walked out from the dressing room. He was a spindly gentleman, wearing a judge’s robe that barely reached down to his thighs, a sort of judicial miniskirt. Wisps of uncombed gray hair jutted out from his head in the shape of a lopsided crown. “Are you the client?” he asked Vladimir in remarkably clear English. He must have spent years scouring his Hungarian accent with steel wool. He probably couldn’t pronounce “paprika” at this point.

  “That’s me,” Vladimir said. “How’s our man doing?”

  “He’s real good, one hundred percent okay. Right now he’s in the dressing room, getting to know the other, you know, the citizens.” Laszlo folded his frame down to Vladimir’s level and put both hands on his shoulders; Vladimir flinched from recent experience.

  “So,” Laszlo said, “this is our standard False Naturalization Ceremony Event, or FNCE, as we say in our industry. We do maybe a couple such events per year, and also a couple deluxe packages, which is the same thing but on a boat and with hookers.” And here Laszlo blinked, curling one tremendous brow. Roberta winked, too, and Vladimir, feeling the pressure, followed suit with a series of rapid blinking.

  “Roberta said I can wire you the three thousand from Prava,” Vladimir spoke up.

  “Yes, plus the FNCE standard package specialized one hundred percent lateness handling charge of an additional U.S. three thousand dollars. As per agreement!”

  “I see,” Vladimir said. “Six thousand dollars.” The Hungarians were adapting to the free market quite nicely. He woud have to borrow some cash from Mr. Rybakov’s son. Still, it was nice of Roberta to fix this up on such short notice.

  “Right,” Laszlo said. “Guests, assume your positions!”

  The crowd of faux Zimbabweans, Ecuadorians, and the like scrambled over their folding chairs, brushing against one another and giggling. Laszlo climbed up the makeshift stage to his lectern, which was actually composed of several cardboard boxes expertly covered by an American flag and outfitted with a portable microphone. A colorful seal reading “Department of Justis” hung in the background, another excellent approximation, except for that slight misspelling and the somewhat frightened expression in the eye of the American eagle. “And now let us welcome the candidates for na-tu-ra-li-zation!” Laszlo boomed.

  Applause from the guest sector as the candidates filed in one by one: Jewish and Anglo women in dark makeup and bizarrely overdone headdresses of grapes and mint leaves; men with wavy, blond hair and perfectly suburban physiognomies dressed as if they had just escaped from the set of The Man of La Mancha, and other such apparitions.

  Mr. Rybakov hobbled in. He wore a dark blue suit, double-breasted and carefully tailored to minimize his paunch. Rows of red-and-yellow Soviet medals covered a great portion of his breasts, yet his tie sported the Stars and Stripes to accentuate his change of allegiance. He smiled inwardly, looking at the floor, trying to follow the footsteps of the kimono-clad woman in front of him.

  Vladimir couldn’t help himself. Upon seeing the Fan Man he sprang to his feet and clapped the loudest, shouting with a Russian cheer, “Ura! Ura, Aleksander!” Roberta pulled on his jacket, reminding him that the point was not to get Rybakov riled up, but all the sailor did was smile meekly to acknowledge his friend, then took his seat beneath a giant crepe banner that read CONGRATULATIONS, NEW AMERICANS. They had parked him between the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga and another Caucasian-looking individual in order to avoid the previous incident with the Arab. However, in front of him sat a “Ghanaian” woman bearing a giant straw basket of fruits on her head, likely obscuring part of his view. That had been an oversight.

  They sang the anthem, then Judge Laszlo rose and brushed his hand against his eyes, deeply affected by this particular rendition. “America!” Laszlo said and nodded with understanding.

  “America!” Rybakov shouted from his seat, nodding similarly. He turned around to give Vladimir an upturned thumb.

  Laszlo smiled at the Fan Man and pressed one finger to his mouth for quiet. “America!” he repeated. “As you can tell from my accent, I too once sat where now you sit. I came as a small child to this country, learned the language, the customs, worked my way through, ah, judge school, and now am most privileged to help you complete your long journey to American citizenship.”

  There was spontaneous applause during which the Fan Man got up and shouted: “I come to Vienna first, then I go to America!”

  Laszlo waved at him to sit down. He put his finger to his lips once again. “What is America?” he resumed, spreading his shoulders, looking up to the stained ceiling in wonderment. “Is it a hamburger? Is it a hot dog? Is it a shiny new Cadillac with a pretty young woman underneath a palm tree . . . ?”

  The guests shrugged and looked at each other. So many choices.

  “Yes, America is all this,” Laszlo explained. “But it is more, much more.”

  “I collect Social Security,” announced Mr. Rybakov, waving a hand for recognition.

  Laszlo ignored him this time. “America,” he continued, both robed arms swinging through the air, “is a land where you can live a very long life and when it is time to die, when you look at yourself, you can say definitely: all the mistakes, all the triumphs I have had, all the Cadillacs and the pretty women, and the children that hate me so much they call me by my first name and not ‘daddy’ and not even ‘father,’ this is all because of me. Me!”

  Laszlo’s students agreed, vigorously doffing their sombreros and waving around their kente cloth, repeating among themselves, “Me! Me!”

  “This part of the Stanislavsky Method I don’t quite recognize,” Vladimir said.

  “Ignoramus,” Roberta said.

  The oath of allegiance was administered, the Fan Man mumbling right along, careful not to turn on his fellow candidates during the “all enemies, foreign and domestic” bit. Finally, they were called upon to get their certificates: “Efrat Elonsky . . . Jenny Woo . . . Abdul Kamus . . . Ruhalla Khomeni . . . Phuong Min . . . Aleksander Rybakov . . .”

  Rybakov went up to the podium, dropped his crutches, and draped his arms around Laszlo who nearly buckled under the weight. “Thank you, Mister,” he whispered in his ear. He turned to Vladimir and waved his certificate through the air, his eyes streaming. “Ura!” he shouted. “Ura to America! I am America!” Vladimir waved back and took a snapshot with the Fan Man’s Polaroid. Despite the Ghanaian woman distributing ceremonial fruits from the basket on her head, despite Roberta loudly smooching the dapper Alberto Praga, yes, despite it all, Vladimir found himself moved. He blew his nose into the coarse, acrylic handkerchief that came with Roberta’s sports jacket and waved his little American flag made of a similar fabric.

  THEY DIPPED PRETZELS into
the baked salmon salad which Laszlo’s crew had spread out over the time-worn aluminum desks left over from the moving company. “This is not very much,” Mr. Rybakov said to Vladimir. “We can go home. I have herring.”

  “Oh, I’ve eaten enough of your fish,” Vladimir said.

  “Shut your mouth,” Rybakov said. “All the fish in the Caspian Sea would not be tribute enough for you, young King Solomon. Do you know what it has been like for me all these years? Do you know what it is like, to be a man without a country?”

  Vladimir reached far across a table for another container of salmon, determined not to show his betrayal. And, yes, he knew what it was like.

  “What if there is a war?” asked Mr. Rybakov. “How will you defend your motherland if you don’t have one?”

  “That’s right, you can’t,” Vladimir said.

  “Look at me, for example. I’m all alone in this country, I’ve got no family, no friends to speak of. You—you’re going to Prava. The Fan—all I had was the Fan, but now I have this!” He took the certificate out of his jacket pocket. “Now, I am a citizen of the greatest country in the world, if you discount Japan. Listen, I’m not young anymore, I’ve seen just about everything a man can see, so I know how it is: you’re born, you die, there’s nothing to it. You have to belong somehow, to be a part of a unit. Otherwise, what are you? You’re nothing.”

  “Nothing,” repeated Vladimir. Laszlo was pointing to a clock. The show was almost over.

  “But you, Vladimir, my dear young man, in Prava you will be part of something so big, so tight, you will never again have to wonder what unit you belong to. My son will take care of you like his own. And after I finish those business dealings with Miss Harosset and these damn Kandunsky paintings, may they all go to the devil, I will come and visit you and my Tolya. How about that?”

  “We will have a great time, the three of us,” Vladimir said, picturing them rowing down a river with a basket of fried chicken and a jar of herring.

  “And I will walk through the streets of Prava, with my chest stuck out proudly . . .” He stuck out his chest. “I will walk as a big, beautiful American.”

  Vladimir put his arm around Mr. Rybakov’s lumpy back and pressed the old sailor to him. His smell reminded him of his step-grandfather’s who died in America after a prolonged bout with cirrhosis of the liver, kidney stones, and, if one could trust Dr. Girshkin’s diagnosis, an imploded lung. There it was—the vodka breath; the musky aftershave; and that certain brisk industrial scent, which brought to Vladimir’s mind the image of machine oil sprinkled liberally across the gears of a rusted Soviet metal press, the kind at which Vladimir’s step-grandfather once pretended to toil. It pleased Vladimir that the Fan Man smelled the same. “And now, Comrade Rybakov,” he said, “or, as we say in this country, Mister Rybakov, you will permit me to buy you several drinks.”

  “O-ho,” Rybakov said and squeezed Vladimir’s nose with his many-flavored fingers. “Well, let’s go find a bottle then!” They helped each other out into the oddly silent street where the afternoon sun bore down on the cast-iron facades and on a string of idled moving vans.

  HIS LAST FEW hours in Manhattan were spent in a cab with tinted windows; Roberta had been kind enough to advance him a thousand dollars from her considerable savings, and advised him to stay mobile and not to call anyone (especially “the woman”). As for Baobab, according to Roberta, he was holed up with relatives in Howard Beach, while his uncle Tommy tried to broker a cease-fire with Jordi.

  Meanwhile, Vladimir spent two hundred dollars going around the limestone curve of the Flatiron building, down Fifth Avenue past the Ruoccos’ apartment house, then through the smaller Village tributaries that lead to the Sheridan Square subway station. It was from this station that Fran would daily disembark on her way back from Columbia, and Vladimir was entertaining the odd hope of seeing her, just one more glimpse, for memory’s sake. He made fifty of these trips, all of them in vain. It was remarkable the cabby didn’t drive him straight to Bellevue.

  Fifth Avenue, the first Friday of September, the heat and business of a late afternoon, the shish-kebab stands closing down for the day, women with suggestive crescents of calf departing work at furious clips, another grand evening in the making here in the documented epicenter of the precise navel of the universe, the first New York evening that would pass without Vladimir in attendance. Yes, good-bye to all that. Good-bye to Vladimir Girshkin’s America, its lofty landmarks and sour smells, good-bye to Mother and Doctor Girshkin and their tomato patch, to the several strange-duck friends that were cultivated, to the flimsy goods and meager services that gave sustenance, and, finally, to his last hope of conquering the New World, to Fran and the Ruocco Family, good-bye.

  And good-bye to Grandma. To think of America, he had to start with her, the only one who had consistently tried to better his stay here, she who had chased him over the hills and dales of the Girshkins’ upstate dacha trying to force-feed him wedges of cantaloupe, deep bowls of farmer cheese . . . How simple life would be if it began and ended with food-for-love and an old woman’s sloppy kiss.

  And what of Fran? On his final Village circuit he thought he saw her, a straw hat, a bag of peppers for the Ruoccos’ nightly feast, a leisurely wave to an acquaintance passing by. He was mistaken. It was not her. But while he was under false impressions, his instinct was to lunge out of the slow-moving cab, press his lips to one studded ear, and say . . . what? “Nearly raped by a drug lord. Marked for death. Gotta run.” Even in contemporary circumstances, where just about everything is possible, this was not possible. Or perhaps he could have said it in terms she would appreciate, the words of the doomed Swede boxer in the Hemingway story:

  “Fran, I got in wrong.”

  But after this nonencounter with Fran, he ordered the driver to the airport. There was nothing more to be done. America, it seemed, was not entirely defenseless against the likes of Vladimir Girshkin. There was a sorting mechanism at work by which the beta immigrant was discovered, branded by an invisible ß on his forehead, and eventually rounded up and put on the next plane back to some dank Amatevka. The events of the last few days were no mere coincidence, they were the natural culmination of Vladimir’s thirteen years as an unlikely Yankee Doodle, a sad mark on his Assimilation Facilitator’s record.

  Well, fuck America; or, in poetic Russian parlance, na khui, na khui. He was almost glad that he didn’t see Fran, that the past, which only yesterday was the present, was over. He had failed once again, but this time he had come away all the wiser. The boundaries, the contours of victimization at the hands of Mother, Girlfriend, and this dough-bellied adopted land of his, were all too clear. He would never suffer like that again. In fact, he would never be an immigrant again, nevermore a man who couldn’t measure up to the natives. From this day forward, he was Vladimir the Expatriate, a title that signified luxury, choice, decadence, frou-frou colonialism. Or, rather, Vladimir the Repatriate, in this case signifying a homecoming, a foreknowledge, a making of amends with history. Either way . . .Back on that plane, Volodya! Back to the part of the world where the Girshkins were first called Girshkins!

  HE DUG HIS nails into his palms and watched tangible Manhattan become a cardboard skyline behind him. Soon enough he would remember precisely what he was leaving (everything; her) and have his little crying jag on the plane.

  But a few hours later he would already be on the other side, the low-rent side of the planet, recovering, reconnoitering, thinking of pyramid schemes and rich Americans scarfing down pork and cabbage beneath a topcoat of Mittel Europa mist . . .

  Thinking of getting in good.

  PART IV

  PRAVA,

  REPUBLIKA

  STOLOVAYA,

  1993

  18. THE REPATRIATION OF

  VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN

  THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE, on the way from one jerry-built life to another, from the grim, disorganized airport in Leningrad with its faintly fecal odor and the toxic-sweet stenc
h of Soviet detergent on the ground to the grim, organized one in New York where PanAm jumbo jets sat by departure gates like patient whales, Vladimir Girshkin had done the unthinkable and wept. It was the kind of outburst his father had prohibited at the conclusion of toilet training, on the grounds that there were few things left in the world that separated the sexes, but tears and sniffling certainly headlined the list. On that pug-nosed Aeroflot liner, trapped between rows of American tourists playing tea time with their hard-currency samovars and discovering the pleasant reductive logic of the Russian nesting doll, a livid Dr. Girshkin, surely comical-looking to the Westerners around him in his torn leather parka and ruined horn-rimmed glasses (both victims of last-minute violence at the hands of his wife), grabbed his son by the collar and ordered him to the lavatory to complete his whimpering.

  As the older Vladimir now sat in a similar aluminum loo thousands of meters above Germany, his jeans around his ankles, his flowing nose in a towelette, his thoughts easily came around to his earlier bout of transatlantic despair: the customs hall in Pulkovo Airport, Leningrad, the spring of 1980.

  It was only on the night before the Girshkins’ departure that the strange truth had finally been revealed to Vladimir: The family would not be taking the train down to their hutlike dacha in Yalta as had been promised; instead, they were to fly to a secret place, its very name unmentionable. A secret place! An unmentionable name! A-a! Small Vladimir was soon hopping about the apartment, jumping from suitcase to suitcase, making a fort out of the closet using his heavy galoshes as battlements, nearly precipitating an asthma attack through his adolescent rampage. Mother restricted him to the living-room couch, which smelled of childhood sweat and served as his bed come ten o’clock, but Vladimir would not be so easily restrained. He grabbed Yuri the Giraffe, the stuffed war hero whose spotted chest was pinned down with Grandfather’s Great Patriotic War medals, and threw the rattling creature up against the ceiling until the perennially unhappy Georgians in the flat above began stomping for quiet. “Where are we going, Mama?” Vladimir shouted (back then she was still known to him informally as Mama). “I’ll find it on the map for you!”