The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  FIN and BRAVO! BRAVO! The circle congregated around Litvak to pay their dues. Cohen had a turn at the wunderkind with a full frontal hug and hair ruffle, but Larry had bigger fish to fry: He was looking for pan-seared Girshkin on a bed of shallots in red wine sauce. “Remember me?” he croaked to Vladimir from within Cohen’s anaconda grip. He half-closed his eyes, managed to loosen the top button of his shirt, and rolled his head about to demonstrate his usual late-night demeanor.

  “Right,” said Vladimir, “Air Raid Shelter, Reprè, Martini Bar . . .”

  “You never told me you were starting a literary mag,” Larry said, maneuvering out of Cohen’s arms, nearly throwing the jilted Iowan off balance.

  “Well, you never told me you were a writer,” Vladimir said. “I’m a little hurt, actually. Your talent is shocking.”

  “How strange,” Larry said. “That’s the first thing I usually mention.”

  “No matter,” Vladimir said. “That story definitely belongs in . . .” They never had settled on a name for the magazine. Something Latin, French, Mediterranean—yes, Mediterranean cuisine was gaining in global popularity, surely its literature would follow. Now what was the name of that famous Sicilian alchemist and charlatan? “Cagliostro.”

  “Dig the name.”

  Indeed. “Only I can’t really make that kind of editorial decision,” Vladimir said. “You need to talk to my editor-in-chief Perry Cohen over there. Me, I’m just the publisher.” But before Vladimir could redeem his plummeting stock with Editor & Friend Cohen, Harry Green was lowing for them all to sit and pipe down in his purposeful Canadian Prairie way. “Vladimir Girshkin,” he called out. “Who is Vladimir Girshkin?”

  Who indeed?

  Vladimir Girshkin was a man who once instinctively moved in the wrong direction and invariably got knocked down every time he saw a person running his way. Vladimir Girshkin once said “thank you” and “sorry” when there was absolutely no need, and often employed a bow so deep it would have been excessive at Emperor Hirohito’s court. Once upon a time Vladimir Girshkin held Challah in his reed-thin arms and prayed that she would never be hurt again, and, to that end, vowed to be her protector and benefactor.

  But presently he held a single sheet of paper in front of him, his right arm unfolding predictably like an architect’s swivel lamp . . . Steady as she goes . . .

  He read:

  This is how I see my mother—

  In a dirty Formica restaurant,

  simple pearls from her birthland

  around her tiny freckled neck.

  Sweat-dappled,

  she is buying me a three-dollar dish of lo mein,

  gleaming over the gold watch

  we found for a bargain,

  four hours of a heatstroke Chinatown afternoon

  behind us. Blushing as she says,

  “I’ll just have water, please.”

  There it was. A poem with little to impart but with clean lines like the room at a good bed-and-breakfast: simple wooden furniture, a tasteful framed print hanging above the couch of some sylvan scene—moose-in-brook, cabin-lost-in-trees, whatever. In other words, thought Vladimir, it was absolutely nothing. The kind of garbage that finds its own void and soundlessly disappears into same.

  Pandemonium! Standing ovation! A regular riot! The Bolsheviks were storming the Winter Palace, the Viet Cong were massing around the American embassy, Elvis had entered the building. Apparently nobody in the Joy crowd had yet thought of writing a small poem that wasn’t entirely self-conscious or self-referential. NATO planes had not yet been called in to carpet-bomb the city with William Carlos Williams’s collected work. It was quite a coup for Vladimir.

  Amid the blare of applause and the trumpet of Maxine delivering her lip-to-lip kiss for the public record, Vladimir made a note of another promising phenomenon: a woman of deeply American appearance (although she was not blond), a clear-skinned, full-faced, brown-haired young woman dressed in mail-order outdoorsy pants and linen blouse, who probably smelled like an environmentally correct shampoo of apples and citrus with an undercurrent of rain-forest soap, was clapping away, her ruddy face made all the more so with simple, unabashed adulation for Vladimir Girshkin. Our man in Prava.

  UPSTAIRS, AT THE vegetarian portion of the Joy, a round metal table of Stolovan unsturdiness was rolled out for the conquering heroes; it tipped back and forth beneath portions of black hummus the consistency of loam and the tureens of beet-red minestrone top-heavy with actual beets. Vladimir got placed in a little male semicircle of Cohen (who refused to look at Vladimir), Larry Litvak (who wouldn’t bother looking at anyone else), and Plank (unconscious). Vladimir glanced about nervously, feeling a heterosexual opportunity being squandered. To wit, the clean and comely American woman he had branded with his verse had also made the trek upstairs. She was sitting at the “Carrot Bar” with the rest of the peons, chatting up a tourist boy. At measured intervals she looked over to Vladimir’s table and smiled with her ointment-shiny lips and milk-white teeth, as if to quash the rumor that she wasn’t enjoying herself.

  King Vladimir waved her over—it was something new he was learning to do with his hand. And he was getting good at it, for instantly she picked her purse off the bar and left the tourist boy with his beer and his crew cut and his stories of what the governor did at his sister’s wedding.

  “Scoot over,” Vladimir said to the boys and the seats were shuffled, water spilled, complaints voiced.

  She was awkward, navigating to her seat (“sorry, sorry, sorry”) and Vladimir didn’t help matters by moving closer to sniff at her linen blouse. Yes, rain-forest soap. Correct. But what to make of the rest of her? She had what in the Girshkin family would be considered the beginnings of a nose, an outcropping really, a small belvedere overlooking the long, thin lips, circular chin, and beneath that the full breasts that bespoke a successful American adolescence. Vladimir had but one thought: Why was her hair past shoulder-length, given the present-day urban conventions that demanded shortness, brevity? Was she, perhaps, a stranger to hipness? Questions, questions.

  But like most pretty people she made a positive impression on the Crowd. “Hi,” Alexandra said to her, and by the sparkling expression on her face it might as well have been a cry of “Landsman!”

  “Hi,” the newcomer said.

  “I’m Alexandra.”

  “I’m Morgan.”

  “Nice to meet you, Alexandra.”

  “Nice to meet you, Morgan.”

  And then the niceness ended and was replaced by a universal uproar over the talentless Harry the Canadian and how everything would be so much better, so much more dignified, if they (the Crowd) owned the Joy and its literary legacy. Here all eyes turned to Vladimir. Vladimir sighed. The Joy? Wasn’t the goddamn literary magazine enough for them? What next, a Gertrude Stein theme park? “Listen,” Vladimir said, “we’ve got to get the ball rolling on Cagliostro.”

  “Ca—what?” Cohen said.

  “The magazine,” Larry Litvak said with a roll of the eyes. When not stoned out of his gourd he apparently found ignorance quite shocking.

  “We’re calling it what?” Cohen said, turning on Vladimir.

  “Remember you were reading that obscure Milanese metahistorical journal about that Sicilian charlatan and alchemist, Cagliostro, and you said, ‘Hey, aren’t we all just a little like him, staking out our claim in this postsocialist wilderness?’ Remember?”

  “Cag-li-ostro!” Alexandra said with flair. “Oh, I like that.”

  There were murmurs of approbation.

  “Right,” Cohen said. “Actually I was thinking of a couple of names, like maybe Beef Stew, but . . . You’re right. Whatever. Let’s just run with my first thought.”

  “So this is not going to be a mainstream journal,” Morgan said. She looked very sober there, with her hands in her lap, her eyes open wide, her well-plucked eyebrows raised as she tried to put in her two cents among the loud and fractious Crowd. It was bewildering for Vladimir
to see a beautiful person who didn’t make herself the center of attention in one way or another (Alexandra always pulled it off so well!), and he didn’t make things any easier by saying: “Mainstream? We’re not even treading the same brook as the others.”

  But before she could be embarrassed, the conversation instantly shifted toward the topic of the lead piece, and L. Litvak brazenly put forth his Yuri Gagarin space odyssey, when Cohen turned to him and said, “But how can we even consider passing up Vladimir’s poem for the top spot?”

  Everyone hushed. Vladimir searched Cohen’s face for sarcasm, but it looked tempered, not so much resigned as perspicacious, understanding. With the empty beer bottles in front of him and a smudge of hummus in the fluff of his pseudobeard, Vladimir took a mental snapshot of Cohen as he had pretended to have taken a picture of Mother in the nonexistent Chinese restaurant. Friend Cohen getting wisdom, catching on.

  “Yes, of course, Vladimir’s poem,” said the awakened Plank.

  “Of course,” Maxine said. “It’s the most redeeming piece I’ve heard since I’ve come here.”

  “By all means, Vladimir’s poem!” shouted Alexandra. “And Marcus can decorate it. You can draw something, honey.”

  “Then you can put my story right after it,” Larry said. “It’ll act as counterbalance.”

  Vladimir picked up a glass of absinthe. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “I would like to take the credit for this work myself, but, sadly, I can’t. Without Perry’s mentorship, I could have never cut to the heart of the matter. I’d still be writing the adolescent crap, the shaggy-dog poems. So, please, a toast!”

  “To me!” Cohen smiled his “Sunrise, Sunset” elderly papa smile. He reached over to pat Vladimir’s head.

  “You know . . .” Morgan was saying after the ripples of the toast had subsided and no one had anything else to say. “You people. This reading. This is all so new to me. Where I come from . . . Nobody . . . This is sort of how I pictured Prava. This is kind of why I came here.”

  Vladimir’s jaw dropped at the sound of this unsolicited honesty. What the hell was she doing? You don’t just admit these things, no matter how true they are. Did Young Beauty (with the long brown hair) need an introductory course in poseurdom? Self-invention 101?

  But the Crowd soaked it right in, punching each other’s shoulders in jest. Yes, they sort of kind of knew what she was talking about, this sweet, dazzling newcomer in their midst.

  They took Morgan with them after they left the Joy. Later, when Alexandra got the chance to be alone and personal with her in a decaying Lesser Quarter ladies’ room, she found out that Morgan had found Vladimir’s poetry “brilliant” and Vladimir himself “exotic.” So maybe there was hope for her, after all.

  BUT VLADIMIR PUT her out of his mind. There was serious work to do. Phase Two had gone off without a hitch; bad poetry had carried the day; the checkbooks were out and ready. He looked to Harold Green, generously making his way past the supplicants at the Carrot Bar, each begging for one of the Joy’s hefty artist-in-residence grants. By the looks of him, Harold was on the most important mission of his life. Destination: Girshkin.

  No doubt about it, Phase Three’s time had come.

  The suckling phase.

  24. COLE PORTER

  AND GOD

  WAKE UP, SHOWER, and get to church. Vladimir did as his pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience told him. He swallowed vitamins and drank glasses of water. His new alarm clock was still howling. He put on his one and only suit bought on a whim from the new German department store for tens of thousands of crowns and realized that it was meant for a person twice his size. “Dobry fucking den’,” he said to himself in the mirror.

  In the side lot by the opium garden, his car was idling along with Jan. The sky was a desolate bleached-out blue with patches of russet clouds as thick as bark on which, it seemed, advertisements could be placed and sailed above the city. Kostya was doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps; the gardening lessons imparted by Vladimir’s father had long lost their relevance.

  “Good morning, Tsarevitch Vladimir,” Kostya said upon seeing him. He looked more dignified than ever today—no nylon, just khakis, brogues, and white cotton shirt.

  “Tsarevitch?” Vladimir said.

  Kostya ambled over and snapped the shearlike things at Vladimir, missing him by centimeters. He seemed all too happy at the prospect of a Russian Orthodox Sunday. “The check cleared from the Canadian!” he shouted. “What’s his name? Harold Green. The club owner.”

  “The full quarter million? You mean . . . Heavenly God . . . Are you saying that . . . ?” Was he saying that U.S.$250,000.00, the equivalent of fifty years of wages for the average Stolovan, had gushed into the Groundhog’s kitty like the Neva River melting in the spring? And all through Vladimir’s free-market treachery? No, it could not be. The world rested on sounder poles: north and south; the Dow Jones and the Nikkei; the wages of sin and the minimum wage. But to sell two hundred and sixty shares of PravaInvest at U.S.$960.00 a pop . . . That was out there in Loop-de-Loop Land where Jim Jones, Timothy Leary, and Friedrich Engels rode their unicorns up and away into the pink-purple sky.

  True, Vladimir did recall Harry drunk and delusional at the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, his head in his hands, his pate, bald and moist, gleaming like the martini decanters arrayed above the bar. Slobbering, weeping: “I have no talent, my young Russian friend. Only off-shore accounts.”

  “Get out of here!” Vladimir barked without warning, surprising even himself. This was the tone of Mother addressing one of her native-born underlings, some poor accountant with a state school education. Was Vladimir drunk? Or was he more sober than ever? It felt like a little bit of both.

  “What?” Harry said.

  “Get out of this country! Nobody wants you here.”

  Harry pressed his drink to his chest and shook his head without comprehending.

  “Look at you,” Vladimir continued bellowing. “You’re a little white boy in a big white man’s body. Your father and his capitalist cronies destroyed my nation. Yes, they fucked the peace-loving Soviet people right and proper.”

  “But, Vladimir!” Harry cried. “What are you saying? What nation? It was the Soviets who invaded the Stolovan Republic in 1969—”

  “Don’t start with your cozy little facts. We do not bow to your facts.” Vladimir suspended his diatribe for a minute and took a deep breath. We do not bow to facts? Hadn’t he seen that slogan once, in his youth, on a communist propaganda poster in Leningrad? Just what the hell was he becoming? Vladimir the Heartless Apparatchik?

  “But you’re wealthy yourself,” Harry protested through his tears. “You have a chauffeur, a BMW, that nice felt hat.”

  “But that is my right!” Vladimir bellowed, ignoring the kindly impulses his better organ—his heart—was pumping through the left ventricle along with the liters of frothy type-O blood. There would be time to indulge Mr. Heart later . . . This was war! “Have you not heard of identity politics?” Vladimir shouted. “Are you daft, man? To be rich in my own milieu, to partake in the economic rebirth of my own part of the world, why, if that’s not part of my narrative, what the hell is?” At this point, Vladimir himself almost became misty-eyed as he pictured Francesca, the woman at whose feet he had learned the ways of the world, walking in through the gilded doors of the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, smiling wanly as Vladimir beheaded this sorry creature in the same way she used to castrate the politically challenged masses in New York. Oh, Frannie. This is for you, honey! Let greatness and beauty prevail over baldness and nullity . . .

  “My narrative!” Vladimir resumed screaming. “It’s about me, not about you, you imperialist American swine.”

  “I’m Canadian,” Harry whispered.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Vladimir shouted, grabbing him by the folds of his oversized rugby sweater. “Don’t even go there, pal.”

  AND LATER, IN the rank Nouveau bathroom, where the piss of the
English-speaking world mingled on the chipped marble, Vladimir personally applied minoxidil around the Arctic outposts of Harry’s remaining hair, while a lone, smashed New Zealand tourist looked on, one hand poised to reach for the door in case things went too far.

  By this point, Vladimir was rocked from side to side by waves of pity. Oh, that poor Harry Green! Oh, why was embezzlement so cruel? Why couldn’t rich people just spontaneously give money away like that nice Soros fellow? Vladimir even leaned over to kiss Harry’s wet brow like a concerned parent. “There, there,” he said.

  “What do you want me to do?” Harry said, wiping his scarlet eyes, blowing his tiny twisted nose, trying to regain the quiet dignity that, before this wretched evening, had been his signature. “Even if I do grow back my hair, that’s only half the battle. I’ll still be old. I’ll still be a . . . What did you call me?”

  “An interloper.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Harry, my sweet man,” Vladimir said, recapping the minoxidil bottle, his portable fountain of youth. “What am I going to do with you, huh?”

  “What? What?” Vladimir looked at Harry’s reflection in the mirror. Those huge red eyes, the freckled chin, the receding gums. It was almost too much. “What are you going to do with me, Vladimir?”

  AND TWENTY MINUTES later, winding through the darkened streets around the walls of the castle, the parapets coming in and out of the corners of vision, Beethoven’s Seventh blaring off the CD player, Vladimir held the checkbook steady on the crying Canadian’s lap. To be honest, Vladimir was shaking a little, too. It was hard to come to terms with what he had done. But this wasn’t really the worst kind of crime, now was it? They were going to print a literary journal! A journal with Harry’s name prominently displayed. It was all part of the familiar cultural Ponzi scheme practiced the world over—from third-rate dance collectives to those idiotic creative-writing programs. The participants put in their time and money, dutifully attended each other’s kazoo recitals and poetry readings, and by the end of the day the only ingredient missing from their enterprise was the actual talent (much as a regular Ponzi scheme lacks the actual cash). Still, was it so terribly wrong to give people a little hope . . . ?