Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  He will have to do it quick!

  Swaddling is still merrily practiced at the Otto Birthing House, and the dachshund-shaped me is tied with a giant blue bow (bant) around my neck. By the time the taxi from the birthing house arrives at our apartment, my lungs are nearly empty of air and my comically large head is nearly as blue as the bow strangling me.

  I am revived, but the next day I start sneezing. My anxious mother (let us count the number of times “anxious” and “mother” appear in close proximity throughout the rest of this book) calls the local poly-clinic and demands a nurse. The Soviet economy is one-fourth the size of the American one, but doctors and nurses still make house calls. A beefy woman appears at our door. “My son is sneezing, what do I do?” my mother hyperventilates.

  “You should say, ‘Bless you,’ ” the nurse instructs.

  For the next thirteen years—until I don a husky suit for my Bar Mitzvah at Congregation Ezrath Israel in the Catskills—I will be sick with asthma. My parents will be scared witless, and often I will be, too.

  But I will also be surrounded by the strange, unbidden beauty of being a sickly child, the homeyness of it, the safety of lowering myself into a fort of pillows and duvet covers and comforters, oh those madly thick Soviet comforters that are always bleeding their Uzbek cotton interiors. There’s ghetto heat coming off the radiators, but also my own musty child warmth reminding me that I exist as more than just a container for the phlegm in my lungs.

  Is this my first memory?

  The earliest years, the most important ones, are the trickiest. Emerging from nothingness takes time.

  Here is what I think I can remember.

  My father, or mother, awake through the night holding my mouth open with a tablespoon so that I don’t suffocate from asthma, so that the air will get into my lungs. Mother, gentle, worried. Father, gentle, worried, but sad. Scared. A village man, a short but tough muzhik, set before a malfunctioning creature. My father’s solutions to most problems involve jumping into a cold lake, but here there is no lake. His warm hand is at the back of my head brushing the fine hairs with sympathy, but he can hardly hold back the frustration when he says to me, “Akh, ty, Soplyak.” Eh, you, Snotty. In the years hence, as we realize that the asthma will not go away, the anger and disappointment in that statement will become more pronounced, and I will see the curl of his thick lips, the sentence broken up into its constituent parts:

  Eh.

  Sigh.

  You.

  Shake of the head.

  Snotty.

  But I’m not dead yet! The hunger is strong inside me. And it is strong for meats. “Doctor’s kolbasa,” a soft Russian mortadella substitute; then, as my teeth grow in complexity, vetchina, or Russian ham, and buzhenina, dangerously chewy cold baked pork, a taste of which will linger on the tongue for hours. These foodstuffs are not easy to arrange; even the prospect of stinking week-old fish will draw hundreds of people into a queue stretching around the corner beneath the flat, pink morning sky. The optimism of the post-Stalin leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw” is long over, and under the increasingly sclerotic rule of the comically doddering Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union is beginning its swift descent into nonbeing. But how I hunger for my meats along with several teaspoons of sgushchyonka, condensed milk, in the iconic blue cans. “Milk, whole, condensed, with sugar” might be the first five words I try to read in Russian. After the heady nitrites of the kolbasa, I am blessed by a touch of this sweet, dispensed by my mother. And each circle of love binds me closer to her, to them, and every subsequent betrayal and misjudgment will bind me even closer. This is the model of the cloyingly close Russian Jewish family, but it is not peculiar to our ethnicity alone. Here in the USSR, with our freedoms circumscribed and the doctor’s kolbasa and condensed milk in short supply, it is only amplified.

  I am a curious child, and nothing is more curious to me than the electric outlet. The height of experience for me is to stick my fingers into those two shabby holes (Freudians, you’re welcome) and feel the jolt of something more alive than me. My parents tell me that inside the outlet lives Dyadya Tok, or Uncle Electric Current, a bad man who wants to do me harm. Dyadya Tok, along with my meat vocabulary (vetchina, buzhenina, kolbasa) and Soplyak (Snotty), are some of the first words I learn in the mighty Russian tongue. There is also my savage cry of “Yobtiki mat’!,” a childish mispronunciation of Yob tvoyu mat’, or “Go fuck your mother,” which, I suppose, provides a nice overview of the state of relations between my parents and their two families.

  My hunger and curiosity are evenly matched by worry. It will take five more years before I formulate death as an end to life, but my inability to breathe gives me a good preview. The lack of air is making me nervous. Isn’t this elemental? You breathe in, and then you breathe out. It doesn’t take a genius. And I try. But it doesn’t happen. The machinery is creaking inside me but to no effect. I do not know other children, there is no basis for comparing myself with them, but I know that, as a boy, I’m all wrong.

  And how long will the two creatures holding my mouth open with a tablespoon continue to do so? I can tell that it is hurting them terribly.

  There is a photograph of me at one year and ten months taken at a photo studio. Wearing a pair of children’s jogging pants with their outline of a cartoon bunny on one of the front pockets, I hold a phone in my hand (the photo studio is proud to exhibit this advanced Soviet technology), and I am getting ready to bawl. The look on my face is that of a mother in 1943 who just received a fateful telegram from the front. I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. “Why was I so scared of everything?” I ask my mother nearly forty years later.

  “Because you were born a Jewish person,” she says.

  Perhaps. The blood coursing through my veins is mostly Yasnitsky (my mother) and Shteyngart (my father), but the nurses at the Otto Birthing House have also added 10, 20, 30, 40 cc’s of Stalin and Beria and Hitler and Göring.

  There is another word: tigr. My infancy is not graced by toys or what they now call educational tools, but I do have my tiger. The common gift for a young mother in Russia in 1972 is a stack of cotton diapers. When my mother’s coworkers find out that she lives in the fancy new buildings by the Neva River—today these buildings look like something from a declining part of Mumbai, with varicolored, slapped-on wooden balconies—they realize diapers won’t do. And so they gather the eighteen rubles needed to buy a luxury gift, a stuffed tiger. Tiger is four times larger than I am, and he is orange in just the right way, and his whiskers are as thick as my fingers, and the look on his face says, I want to be your friend, little Snotty. I can climb across him with as much acrobatic skill as a sick boy can muster, just as I will climb across my father’s chest for many years to come, and, as with my father, I will pull at Tiger’s round ears and squeeze at his plump nose.

  There are more memories here I would like to capture and display for you, if only I were faster with my net. Under the care of my paternal grandmother Polya, I fall out of a baby carriage and land headfirst into asphalt. This may create learning and coordination difficulties that persist to this day (if you see me driving down Route 9G, please be alert). I learn to walk, but without any particular confidence. In neighboring Latvia, on summer vacation at a local farm, I stumble into a coop with my arms outstretched and bend down to hug a chicken. Tiger has always been kind to me, how much worse can this colorful smaller animal be? The Latvian chicken shakes its wattle, steps forward, and pecks me. Out of political consideration perhaps. Pain and betrayal and howling and tears. First, it’s Uncle Electric Current; now it’s the Baltic poultry. The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.

/>   And then the memories begin to flood in. And then I become who I was always meant to be. Which is to say: someone in love. Five years old and completely in love.

  His name is Vladimir.

  But that will have to wait.

  The Ukraine, 1940. The author’s father, bottom row, second from left, being held by the author’s grandmother. Just about everyone else is going to die soon.

  THANKSGIVING 2011. A three-story minor colonial in Little Neck, Queens. What a class-obsessed Britisher might call middle-middle-middle class. My small family is gathered around a reflective orange mahogany table—product of Ceaușescu’s Romania, dragged against all common sense from Leningrad—on which my mother will soon serve a garlicky, wet turkey kept gurgling beneath a sheet of plastic wrap until the moment it is presented and a dessert made out of a dozen matzohs, a gallon of cream and amaretto liqueur, and a tub of raspberries. What I believe my mother is aiming for is a mille-feuille, or, in Russian, a tort Napoleon. The result is a vaguely Passover-based departure from pastry reality. In deference to its point of origin, she likes to call it “French.”

  “But the best part is the raspberries which I grew myself!” my father shouts. In this family, points will not be awarded for quiet or solemnity; in this mishpucha everyone is always angling for a turn at Mr. Microphone. Here we are, a tribe of wounded narcissists, begging to be heard. If there’s only one person actually listening it is me, and not because I love my parents (and I love them, too, oh, so terribly), but because it is my job.

  My father rushes up to my cousin and mock punches him in the stomach, shouting, “I am still the big one!” Being the big one is important to him. Several years ago, drunk off of turning seventy, he took my then girlfriend (now wife) to his vegetable garden, where he handed her his biggest cucumber. “Here is something to remember me by”—he winked, adding—“I am big. My son is small.”

  Aunt Tanya, my mother’s sister, is ranting about Prince Chemodanin, who, she is convinced, is one of our progenitors. A chemodan is a suitcase in Russian. Prince Suitcase, according to Aunt Tanya, was one of old Russia’s illustrious figures: a faithful correspondent to his fellow prince Leo Tolstoy (although Tolstoy rarely wrote back), a thinker, an aesthete, and also, why the hell not, a groundbreaking physician. My cousin, her son, who is always about to go to law school (as I was always about to go to law school at his age), whom I actually like and also worry about, is talking excitedly about the prospects of libertarian candidate Ron Paul in perfect English and confusing Russian.

  “We’re a good, normal family,” my mother suddenly announces to my fiancée.

  “And of course Prince Suitcase was also a brilliant doctor,” Aunt Tanya adds, assaulting my mother’s “French” with a teaspoon.

  I join my father on the couch in the living room, where he is seeking shelter from the extended family. Every few minutes Aunt Tanya bursts in with her camera, shouting, “Come on, get closer! Father and son, okay? Father and son!”

  My father seems depressed and aggrieved, more so than usual. Today I know that I am not the full source of his unhappiness. My father is very proud of his physique and, conversely, critical of mine, but on this Thanksgiving he does not look as rod thin and athletic as usual. He is gray-bearded and small, not fat by any means, bearing as much weight as a seventy-three-year-old man who is not a Burmese peasant should bear. Earlier, the father of my cousin Victoria’s husband, one of the few Americans that have thankfully diluted the all-Russian cast of my family, had poked him in the stomach saying, “You storing food away for the winter, Semyon?” I knew my father would swallow that insult whole, then, in the space of two hours, metabolize it into rage (“I am still the big one!”), the rage and humor that are our chief inheritance.

  The ethnic cable is on, advertisements for shady Brooklyn dentists and new Queens wedding halls struggling to pump out the joy. I feel my father’s stare needling my right shoulder. I can calculate his stare from almost any distance on earth.

  “I’m not afraid of death,” he says apropos of nothing. “God is watching out for me.”

  “Mmmm,” I low. A new Russian soap opera set in the Stalin era comes on, and I hope that it can move our conversation in a different direction. When we had just arrived in America, my father used to take me for long walks around leafy Kew Gardens, Queens, trying to teach me the history of Russian-Jewish relations through a series of vignettes he liked to call The Planet of the Yids. Whenever I sense him falling down the rabbit hole of depression, preceded by him acting out something violent or phallic (cue the cucumber), I like to move us back to the past, where neither one of us is guilty of anything.

  “This is interesting,” I say of the show in my best American “Hey, let’s be friends” kind of voice. “What year was this filmed, do you think?”

  “Don’t mention the names of my relatives in the book you’re writing,” my father says.

  “I won’t.”

  “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew.”

  Loud laughter from the dining room: my mother and her sister in their natural mirth. Unlike my father, an only child, Mama and Aunt Tanya come from a relatively large family of three daughters. Tanya can be overly sweet and has a strangely American conviction that she is somehow special, but at least she does not come across as depressed. My mother has the best social skills of the bunch, always knowing when to bring people into her orbit and when to push them aside. Had she been born in the American South in the proper era, I think she would have done well.

  “Da, poshyol on na khui!” Tanya, the youngest, is shouting over the din of the television. Well, let him go to the dick! And my mother is laughing a naughty middle child’s laugh, so happy that her sister is here in America and she has someone to say khui and yob and blyad with. Their seven-year separation—Tanya was allowed to emigrate from Russia only after Gorbachev took power—was unbearable for my mother. And because I spent my youth as a kind of tuning fork for my parents’ fears, disappointments, and alienation, unbearable for me as well.

  “I don’t have any friends,” my father says in response to the laughter from the dining room. “Your mother doesn’t allow them here.” The first part is certainly true. I am curious about the second.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer. He sighs. He sighs so much I think he inadvertently practices his own form of Kabbalistic meditation. “Well, God be with her.”

  Lying next to my father is a VHS tape entitled Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union: Part II: Treachery and Treason in America, produced by an outfit called American Patrol in Sherman Oaks, California. (Why does the extreme right wing like colons so much?) I’m wondering what the trigger-happy members of the American Patrol would make of my father, a Social Security–collecting Osama bin Laden–looking Semite sitting on a couch in an ethnic Queens neighborhood, his dining room stinking of immigrant fish, his house flanked by a Korean family on one side, an Indian clan on another.

  “We are living different lives,” my father says, astutely. “And it makes me sad.”

  It makes me sad, too. But what can be done? I used to be more forthcoming with my father, and, consequently, I used to hate him. Now I know just how much pain I can inflict, and do inflict, with each book I publish that does not extol the State of Israel, with each National Public Radio pronouncement that does not bind me in covenant with his famous God. Would it kill me, I think, to tell him right now: You are still the big one, Papa?

  I am the small one, forever, and you are the big one.

  Would that make it right between us? There he was at the dinner table before his depression set in, still high on family feeling and a little bit of vodka, rushing over to serve me first, ladling in the mushroom soup, extra heavy on the onions, that he makes special for me. “Sour cream?” he asks me. “Yes, please.” “Bread? Vodka? Cucumber?” Yes, yes, and yes, Papa. The rest of the table might as well not exist for him.

  “He loves you so much,” a girlfriend
I brought to the family table once told me, “but he doesn’t know how to express it. Everything he does and says comes out wrong.”

  I want to stay with him and make him feel better. I want to finish watching the Russian show on TV. Finish off the cucumbers and the soup choked with the mushrooms he has picked himself in a dense upstate forest. “Forty dollars each mushroom would cost in the store!” my mother is yelling at my cousin who is failing to partake of the dense fungus. “And still he won’t eat it!”

  I want to have a family. I want to laugh, and also be awed by Aunt Tanya’s postmodern let’s-get-it-over-with-and-really-start-drinking Thanksgiving toast: “God bless America whatever.”

  I want to be there when my mother, usually so in control, has cut herself three times in the course of preparing her “French.” Are her hands shaking? Is her eyesight failing? She looks so tired today. Will she recover in time for the manic burst of cleaning and worrying that will accompany her into the night? Is God watching out for us?

  I want to close my eyes and feel a part of the cornucopia of insanity swirling around the table, because that insanity has alighted on my shoulders as well.

  But I also want to go home. To Manhattan. To the carefully constructed, utterly inoffensive apartment that I have wrought to show in part that the past is not the future, that I am my own man. This is the creed I have made for myself: Day Zero. A new start. Keep the rage in check. Try to decouple the rage from the humor. Laugh at things that are not sourced from pain. You are not them. He is not you. And each day, with or without my parents’ presence, my creed proves to be bullshit.

  The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I am small, and my father is big. But the Past—it is the biggest.