The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  Vladimir shrugged. Zorba? Couldn’t be. “Socrates, I think,” shouted Kostya. He sped ahead of Vladimir as if to show him how it could be done. Soon he disappeared completely. Vladimir panted. His eyes were clouded over with tears, his pulse was going faster than the Fan Man’s fan set to HIGH. Then the sandy path disappeared also. It got dark, maybe there was a cloud overhead. There was the crunch of grass and twigs. There was a shout of “Hey.” He hit something hard with his head.

  VLADIMIR’S THROAT PASSED a ball of phlegm the size of a frog. He looked at it lying next to him in the grass. Kostya was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “So you ran into a tree,” he said. “No big deal. The tree’s all right. You just got a dash of blood here. We have American Band-Aids in the house. Gusev’s men go through them like vodka.”

  Vladimir blinked a couple of times then tried to flip himself over. This resting-under-a-tree part was nice, much better than running around in the sun. Did he feel stupid? Not at all—varsity sports weren’t on his résumé. Maybe now the idiot Kostya would leave him alone to his asthma and his alcohol. “Okay, so we’ll start out slow next time,” Kostya said. “I see we have some limitations.”

  We? Vladimir tried to beam disgust into the madman’s face, but it was too busy looking all sweet and puffy, while the hands carefully worked his wound as if Vladimir were Kostya’s best buddy brought down at Stalingrad. Vladimir pictured this scene on a recruiting poster entitled: “You’re in the mafiya now!”

  “Right,” Vladimir said. “Start out slow next time. Maybe we’ll do some . . .” He could think of no Russian equivalent to power-walking. “We’ll lift some light weights or something.”

  “I got those,” Kostya said. “Light and heavy, however you like them. But my guess is you need to develop your cardiovascular system.”

  “No, I think I need to lift some very light weights,” Vladimir said, but there was no arguing with Kostya. They would run slowly around the track while bearing light weights every noon on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. “The other days I’m in church,” explained Kostya.

  “Of course you are,” Vladimir said, staring blankly at his own blood flowing dark and somber against the outrageous pinks and violets of Kostya’s jumpsuit. Fuck him. But he had one thought: “Isn’t church only on Sunday?”

  “I help out in the mornings on Wednesday and Friday,” explained the cherub. “They have a very small Russian Orthodox community here and they really need a lot of help. My family, you see, has very strong religious roots going back to before the revolution. We’ve had priests, deacons, monks . . .”

  “Oh, my grandfather was a deacon,” said the absentminded Vladimir.

  And that was how he got himself invited to church.

  ON THE AMERICAN front, things were moving. When the afternoons of loafing around the compound, pretending to develop a business strategy and learn the local language exhausted themselves, Vladimir, along with Jan, the youngest, least mustached of all the Stolovan drivers, flew past the castle down to the golden city. The BMW assigned to him, Vladimir learned, was not of the top class such as the ones requisitioned by Gusev and some of his direct subordinates and, of course, the Groundhog who had two Beamers, one with a fixed roof, the other a convertible. Vladimir learned a lot about cars from Jan, on whom he would also practice his Stolovan. While his new friend derailed trams and scared the living crap out of dachshunds and babushkas alike, Vladimir learned to say: “This car is bad. There’s no five-disc CD changer.” And, alternatively: “You have a face that is attractive to me. Come inside my nice car.”

  His web expanded from Eudora Welty’s and the Nouveau to the Air Raid Shelter, the Boom Boom Room, Jim’s Bar, and even, after one mistaken foray, Club Man. There were whispers:

  “That’s the publisher, the new one.”

  “He’s the talent scout. For that multinational. PravaInvest.”

  “The novelist, you must have heard of him . . . Sure, he’s published all over the place.”

  “I’ve seen him with Alexandra! She asked me to light her cigarette at the Nouveau once . . .”

  “We should buy him a Unesko.”

  “My God, he’s sneering our way.”

  In the course of it all, Vladimir had developed a solid, workmanlike crush on Alexandra. He looked all over her undeniably accomplished body, whenever her eyes scanned the menu, the beer list, the wine list, or were somehow otherwise engaged, then brought the little slips of memory back to his panelak where by night they fueled his dreams, by day provided contemplation: her lips, soft and maraschino-red against the gray-brick backdrop of the Old Town Hall; breast seen from above, overhanging a square marble table; long tanned arms reaching out constantly to embrace some local celebrity, press him into her signature raised clavicle. It was nothing heavy, like it had been with Francesca. Just a refreshingly honest (albeit pathetic) and sexually-affirming thing to do, and he went about doing it methodically. He asked her to lunch, but to allay any suspicion of his romantic intentions he had to ask all of them in turn, and frequently Marcus accompanied her. These were business lunches where nothing got accomplished, ideas for the magazine were pushed around like mah-jongg tiles, but ultimately it was the gossip and who-bedded-who crap that was published breathlessly in the sweet and smoky café air. Alexandra, sadly, bedded only Marcus, the rugby runt, who Vladimir learned was an asshole par excellence, but one that nipped and tugged at his own ass daily for the coveted spot of editor-in-chief.

  “Oi, these fucks,” Marcus would say in a Cockney adopted from years of being physically big and artistically small in London’s West End, as he scanned the sourpussed patrons of the café/bar/disco/restaurant. “The next Hemingway they think they are.” And there was Marcus’s problem: he didn’t write. He acted, and, in an effort to bridge the gap between what he could do and what Prava wanted him to do, he had taken up painting and what Alexandra hopefully termed “the graphic arts.” Vladimir figured he’d slot him in for art editor, which would theoretically mean that Marcus would “edit” however many of his own pieces he wished, stick them into the damn thing, and call it a day.

  For editor-in-chief Vladimir’s system of patronage telegraphed Cohen in both italics and bold print. Also for best friend, pal, buddy, that sort of thing. Cohen was indispensable. The nabobs liked him, Vladimir learned, because he stumbled and said absolutely wrong things like “faggot” and “gosh,” and he looked the part, too—this thick rural Iowan. At the same time, he was an angry and disdainful Jewish fellow, suspicious that the Midwestern mohel, short on practice, had taken a little too much of his wiener on the eighth day of his life, a crisis commensurate with being the supposedly sole Iowan Jew (not to mention one who had Hitler for a father), which proved once and for all that the world was out to get him, and so here he was in Prava, the edge of the known world.

  He also was well connected up in Amsterdam and down in Istanbul, producing tiny packets par avion that were the finest in hydroponic science and Turkish know-how and led to many placid, indebted expressions on both sides of the Tavlata. Vladimir’s old friend Baobab, of course, was similarly occupied, but the fool across the ocean carried out his enterprise not out of social concern, but for crude, selfish profit (his stuff was notoriously full of seeds and twigs, too).

  And let’s not forget that Cohen was Vladimir’s mentor, a position Cohen never failed to mention, as in “I’m mentoring Vladimir tomorrow,” and “We have a very satisfying mentorship.” It took place in the cramped Lesser Quarter alley where Cohen and Vladimir had first reached their literary understanding. Vladimir’s attempts to change the venue in favor of the gorgeous park that curved upward off the Lesser Quarter and apparently overlooked the castle itself, not to mention the Old and New Towns across the river, were futile. Too obvious for Cohen. “Creativity flourishes only in small, blighted spaces—janitor’s closets, cold-water flats, rabbit hutches . . .”

  Why argue? They went over Cohen’s singular work (“And from the bedroom
there’s the sound / of two lovers reading Ezra Pound”) as if they were rabbinical scholars finally granted access to the kabala, until one day Cohen said: “Vladimir, you’re in for a treat. There’s going to be a reading.”

  In for a treat? Could one still say that in 1993? Vladimir, for one, wouldn’t gamble on it. “But I’m not ready to read yet,” he said.

  “I know you’re not,” Cohen laughed. “I’m the one who’s reading. Oh, don’t look so sad, Grasshopper. Your time will come.”

  “I see,” Vladimir said. But it was strangely disheartening to hear that he wasn’t ready to read, even though the arbiter of his worth was this mangy lion from the American interior. Vladimir knew he was no poet, but surely he wasn’t that bad.

  “Three o’clock, tomorrow. Café Joy in the New Town, it’s a block from the Foot. Or we could just meet by the left toe. And Vlad . . .” Cohen put his arm around him, an action that frightened bashful Vladimir to this day. “There’s no dress code, of course, but I always make sure I wear something beautiful when I present myself to Joy society.”

  THE JOY. VLADIMIR lay on his stomach in his little blond-wood boudoir, meditating on this fabled venue and his chance to impress the crowd with his own verse, to stamp his artistry onto the mass of wealthy English speakers, potential investors all, and to begin (finally!) Phase Two of the master plan.

  Phase One had gone off without a hitch. He had introduced himself, nay, insinuated himself into this unpolished mass of Westerners on the cultural make. But now he had to clinch the deal. To prove to the likes of the dog-breeder Plank and the rugby runt Marcus, that he was not just a businessman out to buy some bohemian friends with a lit mag and a thousand free drinks. And if he could pull off a reading at the Joy, well then . . .On to Phase Three! The actual “take the donkeys for a ride” phase. (Hey, maybe he could even steal Alexandra from Marcus, somewhere around Phase Two-and-a-Half, say.)

  In the meantime, PravaInvest stocks—engraved with all the flourishes and pomp of karate green-belt certificates for suburban tykes—had just been printed and were ready for sale at only U.S.$960 a pop. Discerning investors everywhere, take note.

  And so, to work. He took out his notebook filled unimpressively with notes from Cohen’s tutelage and turned to the “Mother in Chinatown” poem that he had started that fateful day at Eudora Welty’s.

  He read the first few lines of the Mother poem to himself. A small string of pearls from her birth land . . . Ludicrous, yes. But definitely of the moment.

  On the other hand, what if . . . ? What if Cohen and the whole Crowd saw right through him? What if they were baiting Vladimir to the Joy only to expose the international-magnate-talent-scout-poet-laureate-publisher for the shameless operator he really was? Vladimir sniffed the air around him, worried he was giving off a fraudulent odor. Sniff-sniff . . . Nothing but the smell of wet dust and the dizzying tang of an electrical fire next door. Furthermore, what if Cohen took umbrage at being upstaged at the reading? What if he united his minions—Marcus, Plank, that other emaciated guy, whatever his name was—and outflanked Vladimir for good? Whom could Vladimir summon on his own behalf? True, Alexandra might defend him, that nutty dear. Plus Alexandra had complete discretion over Marcus and was thoroughly worshipped by Maxine and that other blonde, the one who always wore hip-waders and carried a Chinese parasol . . . But that would only split the Crowd in half. What was he going to do with just half a Crowd?

  If only someone competent could advise him.

  If only Mother were here.

  Vladimir sighed. There was no getting around it. He missed her. This was the first time that mother and son were separated by five thousand miles and the loss was palpable. For better or worse, Mother had run Vladimir like her own five-and-a-half-foot fief up to this point. Now that Vladimir had abandoned her, he was entirely on his own. Put differently, if you subtracted Mother from Vladimir, what had you? A negative number, by Vladimir’s calculations.

  She had been with him from the bitter start. He remembered Mother the twenty-nine-year-old xylophone teacher dutifully preparing her asthmatic son for kindergarten, five months after school had started for the healthier children. The first day of class was a time of immeasurable anxiety for any Soviet toddler, but for half-dead Vladimir it was accompanied by the fear that his boisterous new chums would chase him around the schoolyard, push him down, sit on him, knock the last breath out of his battered chest. “Now, Seryozha Klimov is the hooligan,” Mother educated Vladimir. “He’s the tall one with the red hair. You will avoid him. He won’t sit on you, but he likes to pinch. If he tries to pinch you, tell Maria Ivanovna or Ludmila Antonovna or any other teacher, and I will run over and defend you. Your best friend will be Lionya Abramov. I think you played with him once in Yalta. He has a wind-up rooster. You can play with the rooster, but don’t get your shirtcuffs caught in the gears. You’ll ruin your shirt and the other children will think you’re a cretin.”

  The next day, per Mother’s instructions, Vladimir found Lionya Abramov sitting in a corner, pale, trembling, a great green vein pulsing along his monumental Jewish forehead; in other words, a fellow sufferer. They shook hands like adults. “I have a book,” Lionya wheezed, “in which Lenin is in hiding and he builds a camouflaged tent out of nothing but grass and a horse’s tail.”

  “I have one like that, too,” Vladimir said. “Let’s see yours.”

  Lionya produced this particular volume. It was pretty, indeed, but, with its miniscule text, clearly meant for someone twice their age. Still Vladimir found it hard to resist coloring Lenin’s bald dome a proper shade of red. “You have to watch out for Seryozha Klimov,” Lionya informed him. “He might pinch you so hard you’ll bleed.”

  “I know,” Vladimir said. “My mama told me.”

  “Your mama’s very nice,” Lionya confessed shyly. “She’s the only one that makes sure they don’t hit me. She says we’re going to be best friends.”

  A few hours later, lying on a mat during rest time, Vladimir embraced the tiny curled-up creature beside him, his first best buddy, just as Mother had promised. Maybe tomorrow they could go to the Piskaryovka mass grave together with their grandmothers and lay flowers for their dead. Maybe they would even be inducted into the Red Pioneers side by side. What good fortune that he and Lionya were so alike and that neither of them had siblings . . . Now they would have each other! It was as if Mother had created someone just for him, as if she had guessed how lonely he had been in his sick bed with his stuffed giraffe, the months spinning away in twilight gloom until it was June again, time to go down to sunny Yalta to watch the Black Sea dolphins jump for joy.

  Wheezing along with his new pal, Vladimir hardly noticed that Mother had slipped into the room and was leaning over their prone bodies. “Ah, druzhki,” she whispered to them, a word meaning, roughly, “little friends,” a word Vladimir to this day considered one of the most tender of his youth. “Has anyone assaulted you yet?” she asked them.

  “No one has touched us,” they whispered back.

  “Good . . . Then get some rest,” she said, pretending they were battle-hardened comrades returning from the front. She gave them each a Little Red Riding Hood chocolate candy, as tasty a candy as one could hope for, and rolled them into a blanket. “I like your mama’s hair, the way it’s so black you can almost see yourself in it,” Lionya said thoughtfully.

  “She is beautiful,” Vladimir agreed. His mouth coated with chocolate, he went to sleep and dreamt that the three of them—Mother, Lionya, and he—were hiding along with Lenin in his horse-tail tent. It was cramped. There wasn’t much room for bravery or anything else. All they could do was huddle together and await an uncertain future. To pass the time, they took turns braiding Mother’s lustrous hair, making sure it framed her delicate temples just so. Even V. I. Lenin had to admit to his young friends that “it is always a great honor to braid the hair of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin of Leningrad.”

  BACK IN HIS prava panelak, Vladimir got up from h
is bed. He tried walking the way Mother had shown him a few months ago in Westchester. He straightened his posture until his back hurt. He put his feet together gentile-style, nearly scuffing his shiny new loafers, a parting gift from SoHo. But in the end he found the whole exercise pointless. If he could survive Soviet kindergarten hobbling Jewishly from humiliation to humiliation, then surely he could survive the scrutiny of some Midwestern clown named Plank.

  And yet, even at a distance of half the globe, he could still feel Mother’s fingers poking his spine, her eyes moistening, the lyrical hysteria well on its way . . . How she had loved him once! How she had doted on her only child! How she had set an absolute standard for herself: I will do anything in the world for him, throw myself in front of the likes of Seryozha Klimov, enlist five-year-old playmates to his cause, leave my dying mother behind to emigrate to the States, force my ne’er-do-well husband into a life of illicit profit, just to make sure little Vladimir continues to breathe each shallow breath in safety and comfort.

  How does one person sign over an entire lifetime to another? Selfish Vladimir could hardly begin to imagine it. And yet generations of Jewish-Russian women had done the same for their sons. Vladimir was part of a grand tradition of ultimate sacrifice and unbounded insanity. Only he had somehow managed to break free of this filial bondage and now found himself motherless and alone, punished and chastened.

  What do I do now? Vladimir asked the woman across the ocean. Help me, Mama . . .

  Amid the ghostly warble of old Soviet satellites circling over Prava, Mother gave her answer. Proceed, my little treasure! she said. Take those uncultured bastards for all they’re worth!

  What? He looked up to the cardboard ceiling above him. He had not expected such criminal candor. But how can you be sure? What about the wrath of Cohen . . .

  Cohen’s an ignoramus, came the reply. He’s no Lionya Abramov. Just another American, like that smiling hippopotamus-girl at my office who tried to screw me over last week. Who’s smiling now, fat suka? . . . No, the time for Phase Two has come, my son. Take your little poem to the reading. Do not be afraid . . .