Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  But whom I really missed that summer, the reason for my violent outburst against all manner of Ukrainians, was my real best friend. My father. Because all those other memories are just cue cards for an enormous stage set that has long evaporated along with the rest of the Soviet Union. Did any of this really happen? I sometimes ask myself. Did Junior Comrade Igor Shteyngart ever really huff and puff his way across the shoreline of the Black Sea, or was that some other imaginary invalid?

  Summer 1978. I lived then for the long line to the phone booth marked by the word LENINGRAD (separate phone booths for different cities) to hear my father’s voice crackle dimly against every technological problem the country was experiencing, from a failed nuclear test in the Kazakh desert to a sick braying billy goat in nearby Belorussia. We were all connected by failure back then. The whole Soviet Union was just fading out. My father told me stories over the phone, and to this day I think my hearing is the most active of my five senses because I would strain to hear him so acutely during my Black Sea vacations.

  The conversations are gone, but one of the letters remains. It is written in my father’s clumsy childish script, the script of a typical male Soviet engineer. It’s a letter that survives because so many people wanted it to. We are not an overly sentimental people, I hope, but we have an uncanny knowledge of just how much to save, of how many wrinkled documents a Manhattan closet will one day hold.

  I am a child of five in a subterranean vacation hut, and I am holding in my hands this holy scribbled letter, the Cyrillic dense and filled with crossed-out words, and as I am reading I am speaking the words aloud, and as I am speaking them aloud I am lost in the ecstasy of connection.

  Good day, dear little son.

  How are you doing? What are you doing? Are you going to climb the “Bear” Mountain and how many gloves have you found in the sea? Have you learned to swim yet and if so are you planning to swim away to Turkey?

  A pause here on my part. I have no idea what these sea gloves are and only a dim recollection of “Bear” Mountain (Everest it was not). I want to focus on the last sentence, the swimming to Turkey one. Turkey is, of course, across the Black Sea, but we are in the Soviet Union, and we obviously cannot go there, either by steamship or by doing the butterfly stroke. Is this subversive on my father’s part? Or a reference to his greatest wish, the wish that my mother relent and let us emigrate to the West? Or, subconsciously, a connection to the Chesme Church mentioned above, “more pastry than edifice,” commemorating Russia’s victory over the Turks?

  Little son, there are only a few days left until we meet again, do not be lonely, behave yourself, listen to your mother and your aunt Tanya. Kisses, Papa.

  Do not be lonely? But how could I not be lonely without him? And is he really saying that he, too, is lonely? But of course! As if to soften the blow, right below the main text of the letter, I find my favorite thing in the world, better than the chocolate-covered marzipan that excites me so feverishly back in Leningrad. It’s an illustrated adventure story from my father! A thriller along the lines of Ian Fleming, but with a few personal touches to appeal to a peculiar little boy. It begins like so:

  One day in [the resort town of] Gurzuf [where I am presently gaining color along my cheeks and arms], a submarine named Arzum sailed in from Turkey.

  My father has drawn a submarine with a periscope approaching a phallic Crimean mountain, covered either with trees or beach umbrellas; it is difficult to tell. The illustration is crude, but so is life in our homeland.

  Two commandos wearing Aqua-Lungs departed the boat and swam for the shore.

  The invaders look more like walking sturgeon in my father’s broad hand, but then the Turks are not known for their litheness.

  Unbeknownst to our border guards they headed for the mountain, for the forest.

  The Turks—or are they really Turks, perhaps they are American spies merely using Turkey as a staging ground (Jesus Christ, I’m not even seven years old, and already so many enemies!)—are indeed climbing the beach-umbrella-covered mountain. One thought: “our border guards.” A sleight of hand, on my father’s part; he has devoted the previous thirty years of his life to hating the Soviet Union, much as he will devote the next thirty to loving America. But we haven’t left the country yet. And I, militant worshipper of the Red Army, red Pioneer neckties, just about anything bloody red, am not allowed to know yet what my father knows, namely that everything I hold dear is untrue.

  He writes:

  In the morning the Soviet border guards saw fresh trails on the beach of the “Pushkin” sanatorium and called on the border guard, who summoned their search dog. She quickly found the two hidden Aqua-Lungs under the rocks. It was clear—an enemy. “Search!” the border guards commanded the dog, and she immediately ran in the direction of the International Pioneers Camp.

  Oh, what I would give for a doggie, the adorable fuzzy kind my father’s pen is now deploying against those overweight American Turks. But my mother has enough troubles managing me, let alone a pet.

  Story to be continued—at home.

  To be continued? At home? How cruel. How will I know if the brave Soviet border guard doggie and her heavily armed human masters will discover the enemy and do to the enemy what I wish to be done to the enemy? That is, the infliction of a slow, cruel death, the only kind we’re comfortable with here in the USSR. Death to the Germans, death to the fascists, death to the capitalists, death to the enemies of the people! How my blood boils even at this ridiculously young age, how infused I am with helpless anger. And if you fast-forward to the virgin futon in my roach-infested Brooklyn studio, to the drunken downtown resettlement agency, to the annex of the Strand bookstore, circa 1996, believe me, I am still full of vile, unanalyzed, de-Oberlinized rage. A quiet, thoughtful child on the outside, garrulous and funny, but scratch this Russian and you will find a dozen Tatars, give me a rake and I will rush against the enemy hidden in the village bales, I will flush them out like a border collie, I will rip them to the shreds with my own teeth. Insult my pet mechanical rooster, will you! And so: anger, excitement, violence, and love. “Little son, there are only a few days left until we meet again,” my father writes, and these words are truer and sadder than any in my life. Why a few days more? Why not right now? My father. My hometown. My Leningrad. The Chesme Church. The countdown has already begun. Each moment, each meter of distance between us, is intolerable.

  It’s 1999. Three years after my panic attack at the Strand Book Annex. I’ve returned to my Petersburg, née Leningrad, née Petrograd, for the first time in twenty years. I am twenty-seven years old. In about eight months, I will sign a book deal for a novel no longer called The Pyramids of Prague.

  But I don’t know that yet. I’m still operating on the theory that I will fail at everything I try. In 1999 I am employed as a grant writer for a Lower East Side charity, and the woman I’m sleeping with has a boyfriend who isn’t sleeping with her. I’ve returned to St. Petersburg to be carried away by a Nabokovian torrent of memory for a country that no longer exists, desperate to find out if the metro still has the comforting smells of rubber, electricity, and unwashed humanity that I remember so well. I return home during the tail end of the Wild East days of the Yeltsin era, when the president’s drinking bouts vie for the front pages with spectacular acts of urban violence. I return to what, in looks and temperament, is now a third-world country in steady free fall, every childhood memory—and there were fates worse, far worse, than a Soviet childhood—soiled by the new realities. The accordion-style bendy bus on the way from the airport has a hole the size of a child between its two halves. I know this because a small child nearly falls out when the bus lurches to a halt. It takes me less than an hour after landing to find a metaphor for my entire visit.

  By day four of my return I learn that my exit visa—foreigners in Russia must have a permit both to enter and leave the country—is incomplete without a certain stamp. A good third of my homecoming is spent hunting for this validation.
I find myself boxed in by gargantuan Stalin-era buildings in the middle of Moskovskaya Ploshchad, Moscow Square, the exact neighborhood where I lived as a child. I am waiting for a woman from a questionable visa service so that I can bribe a hotel clerk with a thousand rubles (about thirty-five dollars at the time) to have my visa properly authenticated. I am waiting for her in the scruffy lobby of the Hotel Mir, “the worst hotel in the world,” as I will call it in my Travel + Leisure article a few years later. The Hotel Mir, I should add, is exactly down the street from the Chesme Church.

  And without warning I can’t breathe.

  The world is choking me, the country is choking me, my fur-collared overcoat is pressing down on me with intent to kill. Instead of Tony Soprano’s “ginger ale in my skull” I am subject to an explosion of seltzer and rum across my horizon. On my seltzer-and-rum legs I wobble over to a new McDonald’s on the nearby square still crowned with Lenin’s statue, the square where my father and I used to play hide-and-seek beneath Lenin’s legs. Inside the McDonald’s I try to find refuge in the meaty midwestern familiarity of this place. If I am an American—hence invincible—please let me be invincible now! Make the panic stop, Ronald McDonald. Return to me my senses. But reality continues to slip away as I put my head down on the cold slab of a fast-food table, weak third-world children all around me dressed in party hats celebrating some turning point in little Sasha’s or Masha’s life.

  Writing about the incident in The New Yorker in 2003, I surmised: “My panic [attack] was an off-shoot of my parents’ fear twenty years ago: the fear of being refused permission to emigrate, of becoming what was then called a refusenik (a designation that brought with it a kind of jobless state-sanctioned purgatory). Part of me believed that I would not be allowed to leave Russia. That this—an endless cement square teeming with unhappy, aggressive people in awful leather jackets—would be the rest of my life.”

  But now I know that was not the truth. It wasn’t about the visa stamp, the bribe, the refusenik status, any of it.

  Because as the world spins around me at the McDonald’s there’s one thing I’m trying not to think about, and it’s the Chesme Church nearby. Its “sugarcoated spires and crenellations.” I’m trying not to be five years old again. But why not? Just look at me and my papa! We’ve launched something between those church spires. Yes, I’m remembering it now. It’s a toy helicopter on a string, buzzing between them. Only now it’s stuck! The helicopter is stuck between the spires, but we are still happy because we are better than this, better than the country around us! This must be the happiest day of my life.

  But why am I panicking? Why is the oval of Ativan disappearing beneath my fake white built-in American teeth?

  What happened at the Chesme Church twenty-two years ago?

  I don’t want to go back there. Oh, no, I do not. Whatever happened, I must not think of it. How I want to be home in New York right now. How I want to sit over my flimsy garage-sale kitchen table, press my American teeth into Mother’s $1.40 Kiev-style chicken cutlet, and feel the disgusting buttery warmth all over my stupid little mouth.

  The nesting doll of memory collapses into its component pieces, each leading someplace smaller and smaller, even as I get bigger and bigger.

  Father.

  Helicopter.

  Church.

  Mother.

  Pyotr Petrovich Roosterovich.

  Turks on the beach.

  Soviet lies.

  Oberlin love.

  The Pyramids of Prague.

  Chesme.

  The book.

  I am standing there once again in the Fulton Street Strand, holding St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars, the baroque blue hues of the Smolny Convent Cathedral practically jumping off the cover. I am opening the book, for the first time, to page 90. I am turning to that page. I am turning to that page again. The thick page is turning in my hand.

  What happened at the Chesme Church twenty-two years ago?

  No. Let us forget about that. Let us leave me in Manhattan, for now, as I turn the page at the Strand, innocent and naïve in my nine-to-five shirt, with my dickish liberal arts ponytail behind me, my novelist dreams in front of me, and my love and anger burning as crimson as ever. As my father wrote in his adventure story:

  To be continued—at home.

  The author is told that the breadline does not, in fact, deliver.

  CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH

  IGOR SHTEYNGART

  5 July 1972

  Dear Parents!

  We cordially congratulate you and share your joy at the birth of a new human being—a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a member of the future Communist Society.

  We wish your family health, much love, friendship, and harmony.

  We are certain that you will raise your son to be a conscientious toiler and a loyal patriot of our great motherland!

  Signed,

  Executive Committee of the

  Leningrad City Council of Workers’ Deputies

  I AM BORN.

  My pregnant mother crosses a Leningrad street and a truck driver honks at her, because scaring pregnant women is the thing to do. She grabs her stomach. The water breaks. She rushes to the Otto Birthing House on Vasilyevsky Island, an important floating appendage to the map of Leningrad, the same birthing house where she and her two sisters have come into the world. (Russian children are not born in full-fledged hospitals as in the West.) Several weeks premature, I drop out of my mother, legs and ass first. I am long and skinny and look a bit like a dachshund in human form, except that I have a fantastically large head. “Well done!” the orderlies tell my mother. “You’ve given birth to a good muzhik.” The muzhik, the sturdy, brawny Russian man, is the last thing I will ever become, but what rankles my mother is that the orderlies are using the informal form of address with her (ty versus vy). My mother is sensitive to these distinctions. She is from a good family and not merely another Jewess (yevreika) you can informally insult.

  The Otto Birthing House. For a “member of the future Communist Society,” this Art Nouveau–ish building is as fine a place to be born as any in the city, perhaps the country. Beneath my mother’s feet, an exquisitely tiled floor bearing the motif of waves and butterflies; above her, chrome chandeliers; outside, the enormous Petrine buildings of the Twelve Colleges of Leningrad State University and a calming burst of Russian evergreens within the subarctic landscape. And in her arms, me.

  I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated. Breast, condensed milk, whatever you have I will suck on it, bite it, swallow it. Years later, under the tutelage of my beloved grandmother Polya, I will become a fatso, but for now, thin and lean and hungry is how I’ll go.

  My mother is twenty-six, and by the standards of the time she is old to be a mother. My father is thirty-three and is already halfway into his existence as far as the local life expectancy for men is concerned. My mother teaches piano at a kindergarten; my father is a mechanical engineer. They own an apartment of about five hundred square feet, with a balcony, in the center of Leningrad, which makes them privileged; in relative terms, far more privileged than we will ever be in the United States, even when a minor colonial in Little Neck, Queens, is added to our portfolio in the late 1980s.

  What is also true, and what will take me most of my life to understand, is that my parents are too dissimilar to marry successfully. The Soviet Union is supposed to be a classless society, but my father is a village boy, from difficult stock, and my mother is from the Petersburg cultural class, a class that has its own problems but whose miseries are laughably minor by comparison. To my mother, my father’s kin are savage and provincial. To my father, hers are pretentious and false. Neither of them is entirely wrong.

  My mother looks half Jewish, which, given the place and time, is too Jewish by half, but she is beautiful in a compact, practical way, a modest beehive of hair sitting atop a worried face and a turtleneck, always a smile ready at the corners o
f her cheeks, a smile reserved mostly for family. Leningrad is her city, much as New York will soon be hers as well. She knows where the occasional chicken cutlets are sold and the pastries bursting with clotted cream. She holds on to every kopeck, and when the kopecks become cents in New York, she will hold on to them even more. My father is not tall, but he is handsome in a gloomy Levantine sort of way, and he takes care of his physique—indeed, for him, the physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself. At my own wedding many years later, more than one person will jokingly remark that it is odd that such a good-looking couple could have produced me. I think there is truth to that. My parents’ blood did not mix well within me.

  Fathers are not allowed into the Otto Birthing House, but for the ten days we are separated my father is struck by the sharp (if not terribly unique) feeling that he is no longer alone in the world and that he needs to be next to me. In my first years on earth he will express these feelings, let’s call them love, with great skill and single-mindedness. The other aspects of his life, a generally uninspiring career engineering large telescopes at the famous LOMO photography factory, his dashed dreams of becoming a professional opera singer, will fall away as he tries to fix the broken child in his arms.