The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  Fran, Challah, Mother, Dr. Girshkin, Mr. Rybakov, Vladimir Girshkin, each had invested a lifetime into building a refuge from the world, be it a bed of money, a talking fan, a cordon of books, a rickety basement izba, a shelf of half-empty K-Y jars, a shaky pyramid scheme . . .But this woman, seen here wielding an awl-type thing over a difficult stake, had nothing in particular to run from. She was on vacation. She could have been puffing grass in Thailand, biking through Ghana, or snorkeling above that infernal Barrier Reef, but she happened to be here, bopping along to the cultural beat of a failed empire with her powerful legs and good disposition. And at some point her vacation would be over and she would go home. He would be waving her good-bye from the tarmac.

  “I’m almost finished,” she said.

  She was almost finished, which made Vladimir feel sad, prematurely abandoned, angry, in awe, in love, at a loss—many things that somehow came together and expressed themselves as arousal. Those thick legs again. Denim covered in soil. It was a strange feeling, but oddly natural, elemental. “Good,” he said, reaching down to barely touch a warm shoulder. “That’s good.”

  She looked at him. It took her a few seconds to gauge the way he was moving from foot to foot, the frisky eyes, the labored breathing, but then she was instantly embarrassed, a young kind of embarrassment “Oh, boy,” she said and looked away, smiling.

  They climbed into the perfect little tent and he quickly pressed himself against her, his hands sunk into her natural roundness and he squeezed and he squeezed, gasping for joy, praying he was going to make good with all this squeezing. And then it occurred to him . . . One word.

  Normalcy. What they were doing was inherently normal and right. The tent was a special zone in which desire existed as a normal urge. Here you took off your clothes and your partner did likewise and there would be, hopefully, a great deal of arousal mixed with tenderness. This idea, as clear as the lake glistening outside their tent, scared Vladimir almost to the point of impotence. He squeezed Morgan all the harder and felt dryness in his throat, a sudden need to urinate.

  “Hi there,” he said awkwardly. This was becoming a favorite phrase. It made him feel romantic in an informal kind of way, like they were already best friends as well as near-strangers about to get naked.

  “Hi there,” she replied in kind. He mechanically pawed at her chest for a few minutes, while she stroked his neck and quivering throat, lifted up his shiny nylon shirt and squeezed his pale stomach, all the while looking him over with an expression that was, if anything, tolerant, attentive, engaged in the problem of Vladimir Girshkin. In the shallow light of the Stolovan sun suffusing the tent with a tawny yellow, she looked older to him, the flesh on her face raw and kneaded, her eyes narrowing gradually in what could have been a flash of tiredness passing for arousal (Vladimir was keen to interpret it as kindness, even a state of grace). There was a jolt of static when he touched her forehead and she smiled sadly for him, at the way her body was electrically charged against his and whispered “ouch” on his behalf.

  The repetitive stroking motion was making her listless. She propped her head up on one hand, brushed some thistles off of Vladimir, assayed the situation, realized she had to take charge, unzipped and removed Vladimir’s janitor pants, squeezed out of her own jeans, her freckled, soft skin coloring the air with the earthy aroma of the hiker, and helped Vladimir climb atop of her.

  “Hi there,” Vladimir said.

  She touched his face absentmindedly and looked away. What was she thinking? Only yesterday she had seen Vladimir and Cohen practically horsewhipping that poor Canadian club owner, that unfortunate Harry Green, over some aspect of the nascent Yugoslav war, and now here he was, Vladimir the conqueror, shivering in the tent’s autumnal chill, rubbing up against her stomach as if he didn’t know quite how to conjoin with a woman, this man who could not put up a tent, who by his own admission could not do much of anything, really, other than talk and laugh and wave his tiny hands and try to be liked by others. She took hold of him and tweaked him with a familiar up-and-down motion, a little rough twist now and again that he seemed to enjoy. He closed his eyes, coughed dramatically, the deep rumble of phlegm echoing through the tent, then issued a kind of moan: “Ma-hum,” Vladimir said. “Aaf,” he concluded.

  “Hi there, strange fellow,” she said. It just came out that way, and by her awkward smile Vladimir knew that she immediately wanted to retract it, for she must have felt pity, a halo of sympathy that could also have been a long ray of the voyeuristic sun worming its way between them; but, no, definitely it had been sympathy . . . Ah, if only he could tell her . . . Dear Morgan . . . She had been asking the wrong questions that night in the middle of the Tavlata. He was neither a good or a bad person. The man lying on top of her, goose bumps dotting his chest, little brambles of facial hair pointing in the four major directions, eyes pleading for some sort of release, wet trembling hands cupping her shoulders—this was a wrecked person. How else could someone be so clever and yet so stumped? How else could someone shudder so terribly, so earnestly before an unassuming woman like herself?

  He was preparing to address her at length, but just then she lifted him up, took his member off her stomach, guided it where it needed to go. He opened his mouth, and she must have seen bubbles forming at the back of his throat, as if he was struggling to breathe underwater. He stared at her with incredulity. He looked ready to mouth the words “Hi there” one more time. Perhaps to forestall this eventuality, she took hold of his ass and plunged him onward, filling the tent with his happy roar.

  27. WHAT IF

  TOLSTOY WAS WRONG?

  THEY WERE DOING well.

  Alexandra had taken charge of their relationship from the outset. A kind of free-floating modern yenta, she would call both Vladimir and Morgan every day to make sure everyone’s emotional passport was in order. “The situation looks positive,” she wrote to Cohen in a confidential communiqué. “Vladimir is increasing Morgan’s range of reference, her cynicism is slowly peaking, she no longer looks at the world from a position of middle-American privilege, but at least partly through the eyes of Vladimir, an oppressed immigrant facing systemic barriers to access.

  “V, for his part, is learning to appreciate the need for a hands-on dialogue with the physical world. Whether spotted making out with M on the Emanuel Bridge early morning or discreetly patting her down at the premiere of Plank’s cinema-verité extravaganza, this is a side of Vladimir we’re more than happy to acknowledge! What’s next for them, Cohey? Living in sin?”

  Morgan’s flat certainly had plenty of space for cohabitation, two tiny bedrooms of a sort and one mysterious room, which was sealed up with duct tape and barricaded by a sofa. A picture of Jan Zhopka, the first Stolovan “working-class president” under the communists, hung over the door to the banned room. Zhopka’s face, a big purple beet with several functional holes for sniffing out bourgeois sentiment and singing agit-prop ditties, was further insulted by a crudely drawn Hitler-cropped mustache.

  Vladimir had always wanted to ask about Morgan’s views on the strange times they lived in, the collapse of communism after Reagan’s sucker punch in the mid-80s, but he worried her response would be too typical, reactionary, Midwestern. Why put up an anti-Zhopka poster when all the cool kids were going after the World Bank? He decided to ask her about the sealed room instead.

  “The roof is leaking something terrible in there,” Morgan explained the situation in her informal English. They were on the living-room couch, Morgan sitting on top of him, henlike, trying to keep him warm (like most Russians of a certain class, Vladimir had an unnatural fear of drafts). “The landlord sends this guy over every few weeks to patch things up,” she said, “but that room is still a no-go.”

  “Europa, Europa,” Vladimir muttered, shifting Morgan from thigh to thigh to keep her warmth circulating. “Half the continent’s under repair. Speaking of, there was some Stolovan guy, a Tomash, I believe, buzzing up yesterday. He kept yelling ‘To-mash i
s here! To-mash is here!’ I told him I wasn’t interested in any Tomashes, thank you. This neighborhood is full of freaks, by the way. You shouldn’t be out here alone. Why don’t I get Jan to drive you around?”

  “Vlad, listen to me!” Morgan turned around and grabbed him by the ears. “Don’t ever let anyone in the apartment! And don’t go near that room!”

  “Ai, please, not the ears!” Vladimir squealed. “They’ll be red for hours. I have to officiate at the Vegan Olympics tonight. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Promise me!”

  “Ai, let go . . . Yes, of course, I won’t, I swear. Oh, you big corn-fed animal!”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “I’m being affectionate. And you are bigger than me. And more corn-fed. It’s identity—”

  “Yes, identity politics,” Morgan said. “Anyway, asshole, you told me we’d finally go to your place this weekend. You said you’d finally introduce me to your Russian friends. That guy who called yesterday was so cute and scared. And I’ve never heard of such an exotic name: Surok. Sounds kind of Indian. I looked it up in the dictionary, and I think in Stolovan it means ‘mole’ or ‘marmot’ or something. What does it mean in Russian? And when am I going to meet him? And when are you going to take me to your place? Huh, asshole?” She pulled on his nose, but gently.

  Vladimir imagined Morgan and the Groundhog breaking bread at the weekly biznesmenski lunch, with its customary postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kasino girls going down on the Hog to the tune of ABBA’s ‘Take a Chance on Me,’ Gusev drunkenly railing against the Yid-Masonic global conspiracy.

  “It’s out of the question,” Vladimir said. “There’s no hot water in the entire panelak until December, the boiler’s leaking sulfites, there’s airborne hepatitis in the elevator . . .”

  And the whole place is the preserve of armed thieves and bandits mostly drawn from the ranks of the former USSR’s toe-crushing, electric shock–happy security organs. “You know, I’ve got to get out of that place,” Vladimir said. “Maybe I should just move in here? We’ll save on rent. What do you pay? Fifty dollars a month? We could split it. Twenty-five each. What do you think?”

  “Well,” Morgan said. “That would be fine, I guess.” She plucked a piece of fluff from Vladimir’s chest hair, examined it closely, then set it down in her lap where it floated dreamily along the inseam of her jeans. “Except.”

  Minutes passed. Vladimir prodded her stomach. Theirs was a relationship more silent than most he had known, and it suited him well—a lack of words implying a lack of conflict, the sleepy embraces and mutual gargling in the morning articulating a simpler, working-class kind of love. And yet, there were times when her silence seemed misplaced, when she would stare at Vladimir with the same uncertainty she reserved for her cat, an abused local stray who under Morgan’s care had grown to Western proportions and now lived a somber, secret life by the windowsill.

  “Except,” Vladimir said.

  “I’m sorry . . .” she said. “I—”

  “You don’t want me to move in with you?” She didn’t want Vladimir Girshkin on a dusk-to-dusk basis? She didn’t want to teach him how to scrape mold off the shower curtain? She didn’t want to grow slow and fat with him, the way other couples did in their panelaks? “I’m practically living here as it is,” Vladimir whispered, scaring himself with the sadness of his voice.

  She rose from her nesting place, exposing Vladimir to the killer drafts. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said.

  “It’s Saturday,” Vladimir protested.

  “I’ve got to tutor that rich guy on the Brezhnevska Embankment.”

  “What’s his name?” Vladimir said. “Another To-mash?”

  “I suppose so,” she said. “Half the men in this country are named Tomaš. It’s kind of an ugly name, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Vladimir said, drawing an enormous goosefeather comforter over himself. “Yes, it is. In any language.” He watched her change into long underwear. He tried to stay angry at her, but the thwock of the underwear’s elastic against that round little belly of hers filled him with feelings of longing and domesticity both. Belly. Long underwear. Goosefeather comforter. He yawned and watched Morgan’s cat yawn in unison across the room.

  He’d have to break into that sealed room some other time, when he wasn’t so sleepy. Nobody kept secrets from Vladimir Girshkin. He’d have Jan help him out; Jan loved to smash things in with his shoulder. They were always replacing car windows and such.

  And he’d move in with her sooner or later, too. Cohen had shown him Alexandra’s confidential report. There was no other way.

  AFTER WORK, VLADIMIR and Morgan would drive into the city and have a kale-and-cabbage lunch at the new Hare Krishna joint, or head for the Nouveau where they drank Turkish coffees and became awake and animated, played footsie to the quick time of Dixieland jazz. But most of the time they spent walking, power-walking, for the November chill was making them brisk. Battling the wind, they would climb to the highest peak of Repin Hill, Prava’s loftiest mountain, a green acropolis crying out for a parthenon. At this altitude, the Old Town across the river resembled a garage-sale assortment of bric-a-brac, the powder towers looking like blackened pepper shakers, the Art Nouveau mansions a collection of gilded music boxes.

  “It’s really something,” Morgan once said. “Just look at all those construction cranes by the Kmart. People are going to come here twenty years from now, and they’ll never know what it was like when all this happened. They’ll have to read your poems or Cohen’s poems or Maxine’s metaessays . . .”

  Vladimir was not looking at the golden city but rather in the opposite direction, at an ad-hoc sausage stand, a greasy little bratwurst Imbiß the locals had quickly set up to feed the hungry Germans. “Sure, it’s a special time,” he said, eyeing a plump little wurst curling over a slice of rye, “but we must beware the encroachment of . . . um . . . you know . . . the multinationals.”

  “I feel so remarkably at ease here,” Morgan said, ignoring him. “So free of anxiety. There were times in college last year, when I would just stand there in the mailroom and feel this incredible panic. Just this kind of . . . unexplained . . . craziness. Have you ever felt like that, Vladimir?”

  “Yes, of course,” Vladimir said. He eyed her skeptically. Panic? What could she know of panic? The world lay prostrate at her feet. When one of the big birds, an owl, perhaps, had tried to eat Vladimir in the forest, she had merely to say “Bad!” to the creature in her firm, customer-is-always-right tone, and off it went, hooting miserably into the canopy of trees. Panic? Not likely.

  “The blood starts draining from your hands and feet,” Morgan was saying, “and then from your head, too, so that you get dizzy. The campus shrink told me it was a classic panic attack. Have you ever seen a shrink, Vlad?”

  “Russians are not keen on psychiatry,” Vladimir explained. “Life is sad for us and so we must bear it.”

  “Just asking. Anyway, I would get these panic attacks in the middle of the day, when absolutely nothing was happening. It was strange. I knew I was going to graduate, my grades weren’t so bad, I had some pretty cool friends, I was dating this guy, not the brightest, but you know . . . College.”

  “Ohio,” Vladimir said, trying to create a sense of place for himself. He thought of the progressive Midwestern college he had briefly attended. Nude relay-racing at the workers’ solidarity festival, steamy Get to Know You showers at the dorm, the massive spring-break sexual-identity crisis. They had practically invented panic attacks at that college.

  “Yes, Ohio,” Morgan said. “So what I’m saying is, my life was okay. There was nothing wrong with it. I was doing pretty good with my parents. My mother would drive down from Cleveland and I’d be, you know, just walking her to her car and she would start crying and telling me how lucky I was, how pretty, how perfect. It was kind of sweet, but maybe a little weird, too. Sometimes she’d drive down a hundred and fifty miles to Colu
mbus just to give me a new Nordstrom charge card or a six-pack of soda pop, and then turn around and drive right back home. I don’t know. I guess she really missed me. They really fucked up with my brother the year before. Dad sort of press-ganged him into working at the firm one summer and that was just the end . . . I think he’s in Belize now. We haven’t heard from him since last Christmas. Almost a year now.”

  “Mothers,” Vladimir said, shaking his head. He reached over to zip up Morgan’s jacket against the gathering wind.

  “Thanks,” Morgan said. “So the shrink would ask me: was I depressed about anything? Was I worried about grades? Was I pre-law? Was I knocked up? And, of course, it was nothing like that . . . I was just this good kid.”

  “Hmm.” Vladimir was vaguely paying attention now. “What do you think it was?” he asked.

  “Well, he told me, basically, that the panic attacks were sort of a cover-up. That what I really felt was this incredible anger and that the panic attacks just prevented me from really lashing out. They were like a warning sign, and if I didn’t have them I would do something inappropriate. Maybe, like, vindictive.”

  “But that’s not you at all!” Vladimir said. He was genuinely confused now. “What the hell could you have been lashing out at? Look, I don’t know much about the mind, but I know what modernity teaches us: whenever there is some kind of trouble, the parents are usually to blame. But in your case, the mama and the papa sound like perfectly reasonable people.” Yes, from what she told him, they lived in a split-level house on South Woodland Boulevard where they raised Morgan and two other Midwestern children besides.

  “They sound pretty all right to me too,” Morgan said. “They only really pressured the boys in the family, even though I was the oldest.”