Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart

  The grounds of the LeFrak development were littered with homemade tents. People were lying on mattresses on a pedestrian overpass, the acrid smell of bad meat being grilled wafting down below. As we passed LeFrak City (“Live a Little Better” its heartfelt mid-twentieth-century motto), the Manhattan-bound side of the Long Island Expressway became an endless jumble of cars slowly maneuvering around men, women, and children of all possible persuasions compliantly carting their belongings in suitcases and shopping trolleys. “Lots of folks going west,” Palatino said, as we crawled forward past a gaggle of poor middle-class cars, tiny Samsung Santa Monicas and the like, children and mothers huddled over one another in back. “The closer to the city, the better. Even if you have to work a five-jiao line. Work is work.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked Palatino.

  “Sixty-eighth and Lex.”

  “Nice area,” I said. “Close to the park.”

  “My kids love the zoo. Wapachung’s going to get us a panda.”

  I had heard of this.

  Three hours later, we were driving down Old Country Road, the Champs-Élysées of Westbury, past the mostly boarded-up ghosts of Retail past, the Payless ShoeSource, Petco, Starbucks. A crowd of would-be consumers still congregated around the 99¢ Paradise store. The smell of sewage and a brown savage haze filtered through the windows, but I also heard the loud, screechy sound of human laughter and people yelling to one another on the street, friendly-like. It seemed to me that in some weird way a suburban place like Westbury, with its working- and middle-class folks, its Salvadorans and Southeast Asians and the like, was what New York City used to be when it was still a real place. There was something lovely about Old Country Road today, folks milling about, trading goods, eating papusas, young boys and girls wearing nothing, verballing one another with love. “They maintain pretty good security,” Palatino seconded. “The good guys got all the weapons, and they’ve spread their assets out strategically.” I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

  We turned off the commercial street and drove headlong into the residential peace of Washington Avenue. Despite the serenity of my parents’ street, I found myself worried by a sign that said “Deaf Child Area.” I tried to remember a deaf neighborhood child from my days in Westbury, but no such creature sprang to mind. Who was this deaf child, and what kind of a future would she have today?

  We approached my parents’ house, the gigantic flags of the United States of America and SecurityState Israel still fluttering obstinately. Huddled behind the screen door, I saw the Abramovs leaning in to each other. For a second it seemed like there was just one Abramov, for although my mother was delicate and pretty and my father was not, they appeared to take on a twin form, as if each was reflected in the other. What had happened in the past few months was unclear. They had aged, become grayer, but also it seemed as if some indeterminate part of each of them had been surgically taken out, leaving a kind of muddled transparency. When I approached them with my arms stretched out, with my bag of Tagamet ulcer remedy and other goodies banging against my hip, I saw a part of that transparency fill in; I saw their creased faces welcome in the joy of my survival, my physical presence, my indelible link to them, surprised that I stood in front of them, secretly hurt and ashamed that they could do less for me than I could for them.

  We were surrounded by elements of one another: my mother’s immaculateness, my father’s unadulterated musk, and my own whiff of receding youth and passing urbanity. I can’t remember if we revealed nothing—or everything—to one another in the foyer, but after my mother ceremonially draped the living-room couch with a plastic bag so that I wouldn’t stain it with the foulness of Manhattan, my father followed through with his usual heartfelt request: “Nu, rasskazhi” (“So, tell me”).

  I told them as much as I could about what had happened during the past two months, skirting Noah’s death (my mother had so enjoyed meeting “such a handsome Jewish boy” at our NYU graduation) but emphasizing how well Eunice and I were doing, and how I still had 1,190,000 yuan in the bank. My mother listened carefully, sighed, and went off to work on a beet salad. When I asked my father about how it had been for them, he turned up FoxLiberty-Prime, which was showing the deliberations of the Israeli Knesset, with Rubenstein, still nominally employed as the Defense Secretary of whatever entity we are becoming, lecturing the all-Orthodox parliament on ways to fight Islamofascism, the men in black nodding sympathetically, some staring off into deeply sacred space, playing with their bottles of mineral water. On the other screen, FoxLiberty-Ultra—where the hell were they still broadcasting this stuff from?—featured three ugly white men yelling at a pretty black man from all directions, while the words “Gays to wed in NYC” flashed beneath them.

  Pointing to FoxLiberty-Ultra, my father asked me: “Is it true they are letting gomiki marry in New York?”

  My mother quickly darted out of the kitchen, a plate of beet salad in hand. “What? What did you say? They are letting gomiki marry now?”

  “Go back to the kitchen, Galya!” my father shouted with a measure of his usual depressed vitality. “I am talking to my son!” I confessed that I did not know what was happening in my hometown, nuptial-wise, and that we really had other things to worry about, but my father wanted to share more of his opinions on the matter. “Mr. Vida,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his Indian neighbor, “believes that gomiki are the most disgusting creatures in the world and should be castrated and shot. But I don’t know. They say, naprimer [‘for example’], that the famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky was a gomik. That on soblaznil [‘he corrupted’] little boys, even the Tsar’s own son! And that when he died it was the Tsar who had pressured him to make suicide. Maybe this is true, maybe it is not.” My father sighed and brought one hand to his face. His tired brown eyes were marked with a sadness I had seen only once before—at my grandmother’s funeral, when he had emitted a howl of such unknown, animalistic provenance, we thought it had come from the forest abutting the Jewish cemetery. “But for me,” he said, breathing heavily, “it doesn’t matter. You see, for a genius like Tchaikovsky I could forgive anything, anything!”

  My father’s arm was still around me, holding me in place, making me his. I no longer had any idea what he was talking about. A bewildered part of me wanted to say, “Papa, there’s an armored jeep guarding the 99¢ store on Old Country Road and you’re talking about gomiki?” But I kept quiet. Whom would it help if I spoke? I felt the sorrow that flowed in all directions in this house, sorrow for him, for them, for the three of us—Mama, Papa, Lenny. “Tchaikovsky,” my father said, each heavy syllable eliciting an unquantifiable pain in his deep baritone voice. He raised his hand in the air and silently directed a movement, from the depressive Sixth Symphony perhaps. “Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,” my father said, lost in reverence for the homosexual composer. “He has brought me so much joy.”

  By the time my mother called me down to dinner—after I had taken a breather upstairs and noticed the replacement of my father’s essay on “The Joys of Playing Basketball” with a gleaming poster of the Israeli fortress of Masada—I was nearly in tears myself. The dinner table would usually be covered lengthwise with meats and fish, but today it was nearly empty—just beet salad, tomatoes and peppers from the garden, a plate of marinated mushrooms, and some slices of a suspiciously white bread.

  My mother noticed my chagrin. “There is a deficit at the Waldbaum’s, and anyway we are afraid of the Credit Poles,” she said. “What if they are still on? What if they try to deport us? Sometimes Mr. Vida takes us in the truck, but otherwise it is very hard to find food.”

  And then a different kind of truth appealed to me, reminded me of how self-involved I was, how residually angry I had remained at the Abramovs and their difficult household. The transparency I had noticed in my parents earlier, the way they had melded into each other—it was simply a matter of looking closely at their bodies and their stunted movements.

  My parents were st
arving.

  I walked into the kitchen and checked the nearly bare pantry—potatoes from the back garden, canned peppers, marinated mushrooms, four sliced pieces of moldy white bread, two rusted tins of some kind of Bulgarian cod-in-a-can. “This is terrible,” I said to them. “We have the jeeps here. Let me at least take you to Waldbaum’s.”

  “No, no,” they shouted in unison.

  “Sit down,” my father said. “There’s beet salad. There’s bread and mushrooms. You have brought Tagamet. What more do we need? We’re old people. Soon we will die and be forgotten.”

  They knew exactly what to say. I had been kicked in the stomach, or so it seemed, for I was now clutching my relatively full belly, and every brand of concern coursed through my digestive tract.

  “We’re going to the Waldbaum’s,” I said. I raised my hand in preparation for their weak protests. The decisive son speaks. “We’re not going to discuss this. You need food.”

  We crammed into one jeep, the other serving as a lead escort, Palatino’s men flashing their weapons at a gang of miscreants crowded around what used to be the Friendly’s restaurant but was now apparently the headquarters of some local militia. Was this what Russia looked like after the Soviet Union collapsed? I tried, unsuccessfully, to see the country around me not just through my father’s eyes but through his history. I wanted to be a part of a meaningful cycle with him, a cycle other than birth and death.

  While my mother carefully wrote out a list of supplies they needed, my father told me about a recent dream he had had. A few of the “Chinese swine” engineers at the laboratory where he used to work accuse him of releasing radiation into the air during his morning custodial rounds, he is about to be arrested, but in the end he is vindicated when two Russian women janitors show up from Vladivostok and pin the radiation leak on some Indians. “When I wake up, my lip is bleeding from fear,” my father said, his gray head still trembling from the memory.

  “They say that dreams often have secret meanings,” I said.

  “I know, I know,” he said, waving his hand in the air dismissively. “Psychology.”

  I patted my father’s knee, wanting to impart comfort. He was wearing denims, old Reebok sneakers that I had bequeathed him, an Ocean Pacific T-shirt with a fading iron-on of some young southern-Californian surfers showing off their boogie boards (also from the Lenny Abramov teenage collection), along with plastic sunglasses covered by what looked like an oil slick. He was, in his own way, magnificent. The last American standing.

  We pulled into the strip mall where the Waldbaum’s supermarket huddled next to a boarded-up nail salon and a former sushi place which now sold “WATER FROM CLEAN PLACE, 1 GALLON = 4 YUAN, BRING YOUR OWN CAN.” As the jeep pulled up directly to the Waldbaum’s door, my parents looked at me with great pride—here I was taking care of them, honoring them, a good son at last. I refrained from throwing myself around their necks in gratitude. Look at the happy family!

  Inside the brown-and-cream-colored supermarket, the lights had been turned down to create an even sadder shopping environment than I had known in the heyday of Waldbaum’s, although Enya was still being piped through the sound system, warbling about the flow of the Orinoco and the cruelly phrased possibility of sailing away. I was also struck by a row of ancient photographs showing the walleyed, balding produce and deli managers of years past, a Westbury combination of striving Southeast Asians and Hispanics, under the fascistic slogan “If it’s good for you, it’s good for Waldbaum’s.”

  My father took me to see the empty shelf where the Tagamet pills used to be stocked. “Pozorno” (“It is shameful”), he said. “No one care about the sick or the old anymore.”

  My mother was standing in the baked-goods aisle, next to an old Italian woman, deep into an angry monologue about the Mix-n-Match butter-pound-cake and angel-food-cake combo, which was priced at an exorbitant eighteen yuan. “Let’s get the cakes, Mama,” I said, mindful of my mother’s sweet tooth. “I’m paying for everything.”

  “No, Lyonitchka,” she said. “You have to save for your own future. And for Eunice’s, don’t forget. At least let’s look for the red-dot special.”

  “Let’s see if there’s any fresh produce around,” I said. “You need to eat healthy. No artificial or spicy flavors. Otherwise, all the Tagamet in the world isn’t going to help Papa.”

  But the fresh produce was in short supply; most of the good stuff had long been diverted to New York. We filled our carts with twenty-eight-ounce containers of cheese balls (a red-dot special, plus 20 percent off) and a lifetime supply of seltzer, which was effectively cheaper than the four-yuan “water from clean place” they were selling out of the sushi joint. I drove my cart up and down every aisle. The lobster cage (“Any Fresher and They’d Be Alive!”) was not only empty, but missing a glass side. My mother bought more mops and brooms in Household Supplies, and I got some decent whole-wheat bread out of the bakery and bought ten pounds of lean turkey breast for my father. “Use the fresh tomatoes from your garden to make a sandwich with the turkey breast and whole-wheat bread,” I instructed. “Mustard, not mayonnaise, because there’s less cholesterol.”

  “Thank you, sinotchek” (“little son”), my father said.

  “Zabotishsia ty o nas” (“You are taking care of us”), my mother said, tearing up a little as she stroked the head of a new mop.

  I blushed and looked away, wanting their love, but also careful about not drawing too close to them, not wanting to be hurt again. Because where my parents are from, openness can also mean weakness, an invitation to pounce. Find yourself in their embrace and you might not find a way out.

  I paid over three hundred yuan at the only working checkout counter, and helped my father load the bags into the jeep. As we were about to drive back to their house, a loud thump of an explosion echoed from the north. Palatino’s men pointed their guns at the perfectly blue sky. My father grabbed my mother and held her like a real man could. “Nigerians,” he said, pointing toward Suffolk County. “Don’t worry, Galya. I beat them on the basketball court, I’ll beat them now. I’ll kill them with my two hands.” He showed us the strong little hands that used to dunk balls into hoops on given Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  “Why does everyone blame the Nigerians?” I blurted out. “How many Nigerians are there on this side of the ocean?”

  My father laughed and reached up to stroke my hair. “Listen to our little liberal,” he said, with that familiar Fox-Ultra bombast in his voice. “Maybe he is a secular progressive too?” My mother joined in the laughter, shaking her head at my silliness. He came over and grabbed my head with two hands, then kissed me moistly on the forehead. “Are you?” he shouted in mock seriousness. “Are you a secular progressive, Lyon’ka?”

  “Why don’t you ask Nettie Fine about it?” I said loudly and in English. “I haven’t heard a word from her. Even after the äppäräti started working again. Why don’t you ask your Rubenstein? He’s done so well by you, you’ve lost all your savings and pension and now you’re scared to walk past a Credit Pole. When he says ‘the boat is full’ he’s talking about you, you know.”

  My father looked at me quizzically and chuckled. My mother said nothing. I cooled my emotions. What was the point? Underneath it all, my parents were scared. And I was scared for them. After a meager family dinner of turkey breast, beet salad, and cheese puffs, I spent a restless, sexless night huddled in the spotless downstairs bedroom, scented with apples, clean laundry, and every other manifestation of my mother’s close attention. I felt lonely and tried to teen and verbal Eunice, but she didn’t respond, which was odd. I GlobalTraced her progress throughout the day—as soon as I left, she had headed up to the Union Square Retail Corridor, then she continued to head up to the Upper West Side, and then her signal just disappeared. What on earth was she doing on the Upper West Side? Was she crazy enough to try to cross into Fort Lee over the George Washington Bridge and see her family? I became acutely worried for her and even thought of rustling
up Palatino and heading back to the city.

  But I couldn’t deny my parents a full visit. There they stood in the morning, waiting for me by the landing with the same worried, submissive smiles that had carried them through half a lifetime in America, staring at me as if no one and nothing else existed in the world. The Abramovs. Tired and old, romantically mismatched, filled to the brim with hatreds imported and native, patriots of a disappeared country, lovers of cleanliness and thrift, tepid breeders of a single child, owners of difficult and disloyal bodies (hands professionally scalded with industrial cleansers and gnarled up with carpal tunnel), monarchs of anxiety, princes of an unspeakably cruel realm, Mama and Papa, Papa and Mama, na vsegda, na vsegda, na vsegda, forever and ever and ever. No, I had not lost the capacity to care—incessantly, morbidly, instinctually, counterproductively—for the people who had made of me the disaster known as Lenny Abramov.

  Who was I? A secular progressive? Perhaps. A liberal, whatever that even means anymore, maybe. But basically—at the end of the busted rainbow, at the end of the day, at the end of the empire—little more than my parents’ son.

  HOW DO WE TELL LENNY?

  FROM THE GLOBALTEENS ACCOUNT OF EUNICE PARK

  OCTOBER 13

  GOLDMANN-FOREVER TO EUNI-TARD:

  Good morning, my sweet, sweet girl, my tender love, my life. Yesterday was so much fun, I can’t believe the weekend is upon us and I’ve got to surrender you to our little friend. I’m counting 52.3 hours until I see you again, and I don’t know what to do with myself! I’m about as complete without you as a leopard without his claws. I’m working on all the things you said too. My arms need to improve more than the rest of my body, they’re the hardest to fix in some ways, the depleted muscle tone, etc. And I’m sorry if we didn’t do enough of the good stuff. I have to pace myself for my heart, because genetically I’ve really been dealt a poor hand there. The Indians tell me that in the next two years I’m going to have my heart removed completely. Useless muscle. Idiotically designed. That’s this year’s big project at Post-Human Services, we’re going to teach the blood exactly where to go and how fast to go and then we’ll just let it do all the circulating. Call me heartless. Hahaha.