Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  And even here, so far away from the wonder towns of Lansing, Flint, and Detroit, something like a life is beginning for me. I have a semblance of health, the lungs are accepting and absorbing oxygen, my Soviet-o-mania is being kept at bay by Honeycomb license plates and the colorful old stash of All Rome, All Venice, and All Florence books, which I look back on as my new founding texts. I am allowed to buy a stamp album with the portrait of a jaunty pirate on the cover and also to order a thousand stamps from a stamp company in upstate New York. Some of the stamps are from the Soviet Union, to my chagrin, reminders of the ever-present upcoming Moscow Olympics, but then there are gorgeous golden stamps from Haiti bearing the images of people at work in the fields, the people we have heard so much about, that is to say, black people. (Some of the other stamps, for no reason I can now discern, are marked DEUTSCHES REICH; one features a jeep being lifted into the air by an explosion. In another, a short, uniformed man with a funny little mustache bends down to cradle the cheek of a girl holding up a basket of flowers, beneath the words 20 APRIL 1940.)

  Underemployed Papa and I go to the neighborhood park down the street. At first, we are confused by the boys who like to run around a dusty field after they hit a ball with a hollow aluminum stick for no reason. So we bring our thing along, a European soccer ball, and some older boys join us in kicking it. I am not good at futbol, but then, I am not completely incompetent at it either, not with Papa by my side, being strong.

  And then it all goes terribly wrong.

  * * *

  * The names of my father’s relatives have been changed.

  A good Jewish boy smiles for his Hebrew school class photo. Notice the widely spaced teeth, the slight furrows beneath his eyes, and the Casio music wristwatch, which played both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Russian “Kalinka” (“Little Guelder Rose”). The author hated himself for preferring the latter.

  I AM STANDING amid a gaggle of boys in white shirts and skullcaps and girls in long dresses wailing a prayer in an ancient language. Adults are on hand to make sure we are all singing in unison; that is to say, refusing to wail is not an option. “Sh’ma Yisroel,” I wail, obediently, “Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”

  Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

  I’m not sure what the Hebrew words mean (there is an English translation in the prayer book, only I don’t know any English either), but I know the tone. There is something plaintive in the way we boys and girls are beseeching the Almighty. What we’re doing, I think, is supplicating. And the members of my family are no strangers to supplication. We are the Grain Jews, brought from the Soviet Union to America by Jimmy Carter in exchange for so many tons of grain and a touch of advanced technology. We are poor. We are at the mercy of others: food stamps from the American government, financial aid from refugee organizations, secondhand Batman and Green Lantern T-shirts and scuffed furniture gathered by kind American Jews. I am sitting in the cafeteria of the Hebrew school, surrounded first by the walls of this frightening institution—a gray piece of modern architecture liberally inlaid with panes of tinted glass—with its large, sweaty rabbi, its young, underpaid teachers, and its noisy, undisciplined American Jewish kids, and, in a larger sense, surrounded by America: a complex, media-driven, gadget-happy society, whose images and language are the lingua franca of the world and whose flowery odors and easy smiles are completely beyond me. I’m sitting there, alone at a separate lunch table from all the other kids, a small boy in already oversize glasses and the same damn polka-dot-and-vertical-striped shirt, perhaps the product of some Polka Dot Shirt Factory #12 in Sverdlovsk or, if it only existed, Shirtsk, and what I’m doing is I’m talking to myself.

  I’m talking to myself in Russian.

  Am I muttering long-remembered crap written in capital letters on the Soviet metro: 1959—SOVIET SPACE ROCKET REACHES THE SURFACE OF THE MOON? It’s very possible. Am I nervously whispering an old Russian childhood ditty (one that would later find its way into one of my stories written as an adult): “Let it always be sunny, let there always be blue skies, let there always be Mommy, let there always be me.” Very possible. Because what I need now, in this unhappy, alien place, is Mommy, the woman who sews my mittens to my great furry overcoat—the one that has earned me the moniker Stinky Russian Bear, or SRB in the industry—for otherwise I will lose them, as I have already lost the bottle of glue, lined notebook, and crayons that accompany me to first grade. “Mamochka,” I will tell her tonight, “don’t be sad. If I lost the glue today, I won’t be able to lose it tomorrow.”

  One thing is certain—along with Mommy and Papa and one sweet kid, the son of liberal American parents who have induced him to play with me—the Russian language is my friend. It’s comfortable around me. It knows things the noisy brats around me, who laugh and point as I intone my Slavic sibilants, will never understand. The way the gray-green stone of the Vorontsovsky Palace in Crimea, where we used to take our summer vacations, matches the mountains and forests around it. The way you get frisked at the Pulkovo Airport in Leningrad, the customs guard taking off your hat and feeling it up for contraband diamonds. The way SOVIET SCIENTISTS CREATE THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION THEORY in 1934.

  Teachers try to intervene. They tell me to get rid of the great furry overcoat. Trim my unkempt, bushy hair a little. Stop talking to myself in Russian. Be more, you know, normal. I am invited to play with the liberals’ son, a gentle, well-fed fellow who seems lost in the wilderness of eastern Queens. We go to a pizza parlor, and, as I inhale a slice, a large string of gooey mozzarella cheese gets stuck in my throat. Using most of my fingers, I try to pull the cheese out. I choke. I gesture about. I panic. I moo at our chaperone, a graceful American mama. Pomogite! I mouth. Help! I am caught in a world of cheap endless cheese. I can see a new placard for the Leningrad metro. 1979—FIRST SOVIET CHILD CHOKES ON CAPITALIST PIZZA. When it’s all over, I sit there shuddering, my hands covered with spittle and spent mozzarella. This is no way to live.

  I am not good with others. In Leningrad, I had been too sick to go to preschool. My mother worked as a music teacher at a kindergarten, and she brought me there on several occasions when my grandmas were not around to babysit. Invariably, I would stand up in front of the class, in front of all those pretty Slavic girls with their white bows, in front of all the xylophones arranged ceremoniously beneath the requisite portrait of musical Lenin, and announce in my self-important Mama’s Only voice to the older children: “I have something to say to you! I will not participate in any activities today. I will only sit and watch.”

  But in Hebrew school, unless I am choking on a pizza, I am too ashamed to say anything.

  There is one exception. The school bus is taking the Hebrew school kids back to our homes, and before the bus can get into the tonier parts of Forest Hills and beyond, we pass our five-story apartment building. “Ober zer!” I cry. “Ober zer! Loook at eet! Eet izt mai haus!”

  And for the first time I am not the weirdo at the lunch table, and no one is laughing at me and making crazy cuckoo signs around their temples. “That’s your house?” the kids shout. “You live in that whole place? You must be so rich! Why do you have to wear my Green Lantern T-shirt from summer camp?”

  As I get off the bus I finally begin to understand the miscommunication. The children think the entire building, all fifty apartments, is my home.

  In the tight kitchen of our “mansion” my father and my mother are going at it with drunk Step-grandfather Ilya. There are family fights that I can now perceive only as colors—a searing yellow-green across my vision whenever I see an elderly bald man clench his fists. No one can curse with the depth and volume of Step-grandfather Ilya. Everyone is going to the dick tonight, and everybody’s mother will be fucked.

  I plop on the army cot that is my new bed, a piece of furniture that’s been donated by two young neighborhood Jews—their amazing-sounding names are Michael and Zev—who for all their kindness seem to me like a second incarnation of the w
oman in the Vienna airport, the one who gave me the Mozart candy with its prized wrapper. Around our table, Michael and Zev’s democratic and Democratic voices ring out countered by my father’s adventurous Republican English, as our new American friends support the departing Georgia peanut farmer presently in the White House and my father pines for the California actor, and in the end all is settled by the gift of a candy (Milky Way!), which I’m not allowed to eat on account of asthma, or more useful items we lack, hangers, a steam iron. For the rest of our furniture ensemble, we have selected a sofa from a nearby garbage dump and bunched up sheets to use for pillows.

  When I feel sad from Hebrew school, I turn to my Soviet atlas and an Eastern Air Lines toy plane my mother bought for half a dollar on Fourteenth Street, the boulevard of discount dreams in faraway Manhattan. Using my atlas, I plot out the flight time to Rome, then to Vienna, then to East Berlin, then back to Leningrad. I memorize the coordinates of the important airports. I launch my plane down the runway of our cluttered apartment, then I sit there with the plane in my hand for the eight and a half hours it takes to get to Rome, humming to myself the sounds of the jet engine: “Zhhhh … Mmmmmmm … Zhhhhh … Mmmmm …” Finally I land the plane on the green army cot (also known as Leonardo da Vinci Airport) and the next day resume the journey to Leningrad.

  Soviet refugees do not freely use the diagnosis obsessive-compulsive disorder. All I know back then is that my plastic plane must never touch the floor until it is time to land, else all the passengers, my whole family, will die. When my asthma reappears and I can no longer zhhhh and mmmm I will tie the plane to a string hanging from the army cot so that it is technically still in the air, then sit there and watch it like the obedient child that I am, while family life takes off and crashes all around me.

  My travels become more complex. I go through Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki, then back to Leningrad. Then through London, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad. Tokyo and Vladivostok. I become an expert on flight times and the names of important world cities.

  Around this time my father begins a difficult spiritual quest. He has found an Orthodox synagogue two blocks away from us. He does not have a proper yarmulke but does possess a multicolored baseball cap with a sea bass on it. One Sabbath he decides to walk down to the shul and sits in a pew in the back. The worshippers at first think he’s “a drunken Spanisher from the street.” But when they realize he’s one of the mythical Russian Jews they’ve heard about on TV, one of their long-lost coreligionists, they shower him with unadulterated love. One of them, a follower of the ultranationalist Rabbi Kahane, gives him ten American dollars. It is the Sabbath and handling money is verboten, but making sure a Jew has enough to eat takes precedence. When my father gets his first job and makes a little cash himself, he will give two hundred dollars to Kach, Rabbi Kahane’s soon-to-be-outlawed organization in Israel—driving the Arabs into the sea a central plank of their platform. And when it is time for us to buy our first apartment, another congregant who happens to be the local mailman will lend us four hundred dollars, no questions asked, toward the down payment. I guess this is what people mean when they say “community.”*

  The next Shabbat and almost every Friday thereafter, I am brought into the tiny yellow building of Young Israel, where I can rock and sway along with the cheaply attired but kind men (the women are sent to a balcony above us) who seem to accept me and don’t think I’m crazy when I accidentally spit out something in Russian or casually molest the English language with my tongue.

  When the congregants of Young Israel learn that my mother was a pianist in Russia and my father used to sing opera, they invite our family to give a concert. After months of anonymity in a foreign country, my father’s bass reverberates across the small, crowded sanctuary as my mother accompanies on piano. Papa sings the expected Chaliapin ditty “Ochi Chyornye” (“Dark Eyes”) and the Yiddish standard “Ofyn Pripetchek” (“Learn, children, don’t be afraid / Every beginning is hard”).

  My exploits with the Soviet atlas and the nine-hour flights to Stockholm have not gone unnoticed. And so, I am presented as the final act—the seven-year-old refugee who can name any world capital! The worshippers shout out, “Belgium!” “Japan!” “Uruguay!” “Indonesia!” Nervous yet excited, I answer those four right but flub the last: Chad. As cosmopolitan as my travels are, I have never flown my plastic Eastern Air Lines jet to N’Djamena. Despite my humiliation, we are given $250 by the congregation for our performance, which we turn into a size 2 Harvé Benard business suit. My tiny mother fills it just in time for her first successful clerk-typist job interview.

  The worshippers at Young Israel suggest I attend Solomon Schechter, a conservative Hebrew day school on a sad stretch of nearby Parsons Boulevard. My father wants very much to be a practicing Jew. My mother, half Jewish, sometimes prays in the Christian manner, palms clasped together, to the God of Good Health and Steady Raises at the Queens watch factory where she now slaves away, rejoicing when the boss gives out free ice cream instead of air-conditioning.

  There are decent public schools in Queens, but we are scared of blacks. If you put together two Soviet immigrants in Queens or Brooklyn circa 1979, the subject of shvartzes or “the Spanish with their transistor radios” would come up by the third sentence, after the topic of asthma inhalers for little Igor or Misha is exhausted. But listen carefully to those conversations. There’s hatred and fear, sure, but just a little down the line, laughter and relief. The happy recognition that, as unemployed and clueless as we are, there is a reservoir of disgust in our new homeland for someone other than ourselves. We are refugees and even Jews, which in the Soviet Union never won you any favors, but we are also something that we never really had the chance to appreciate back home. We are white.

  Over in the leafier parts of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills, the tribal hatred of blacks and Hispanics stands out partly because there aren’t really any blacks or Hispanics. My mother’s one encounter with “criminality” on Union Turnpike: A big white cracker in a convertible pulls up to her, takes out his penis, and shouts, “Hey, baby, I have a big one!”

  Still, everyone knows what to do when you encounter a dark-skinned person: You run.

  Because they want to rape us so very badly, us in our jackets made of real Polish leather. And “the Spanish with their transistor radios,” you know what else they have, other than the transistor radios? Switchblades. So if they see a seven-year-old Russian boy walking down the street with his asthma inhaler, they’ll come over and cut him to death. Prosto tak. Just like that. The lesson being you should never let your seven-year-old boy out alone. (In fact, until I turn thirteen, my grandmother will not allow me to walk down a quiet street in peaceful Forest Hills without holding her hand. Eyes darting one hundred meters in every direction, she is ready to cover my body with hers lest one of those animals with the switchblades comes near.)

  Oh, and if you save up enough money for a Zenith television set with a Space Command remote control, a strong black will surely come by, hoist it onto his shoulder, and run down the street with it. And then a Spanish will run down the street after the black with his transistor radio for accompaniment, playing his cucaracha music. One of them will slip the Space Command into his pocket, too, and then you’ll really have nothing.

  And so, the safety of our own kind.

  And so, the Solomon Schechter School of Queens.

  Or Solomonka, as we Russians like to call it.

  Only they’ll be beating the shit out of me in Solomonka, too.

  I can’t speak English too good, so I’m demoted by a grade. Instead of starting in second, I am sent to the first. In every grade through senior year of college I will be surrounded by boys and girls one year younger than I am. The smarter kids will be two years younger. In the annual class photo I will find myself handed down from the top row with the tallest kids to the bottom row, because even as I grow older I somehow grow relatively smaller.

  How can I be so stupid (and so short)
? Aren’t I the kid who knows the difference between The Allegory of Day and The Allegory of Night in the Medici Chapel? Aren’t I the author of Lenin and His Magical Goose, a masterwork of socialist realist literature, written before I learned to properly make kaka atop a toilet bowl? Don’t I know the capitals of most countries except for Chad? But here, at age seven, begins my decline. First through the wonders of Hebrew school, then through the tube of American television and popular culture, then down (or should I say up?) the three-foot bong of Oberlin College, the sharpness of my little boy’s intelligence will diminish step by step, school by school. The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing why, will be mostly replaced by survival and knowing perfectly well why. And survival will mean replacing the love of the beautiful with the love of what is funny, humor being the last resort of the besieged Jew, especially when he is placed among his own kind.

  SSSQ, I write, worriedly, on the upper-right corner of every notebook for the next eight years. The Solomon Schechter School of Queens. The shorthand is imprinted on my mind, SSSQ. The S’s are as drunk as Step-grandfather Ilya, and they’re falling all over one another; the Q is an O stabbed between the legs at an angle. Often I forget the Q entirely, leaving just the quasi-fascistic SSS. Please work on your penmanship, every teacher will dutifully write. Pen I know because it is my main toy. Man is someone like my father, strong enough to lift a used American air conditioner he has just bought for one hundred dollars. Ship is like the cruiser Aurora docked in Leningrad, the one that fired the fateful shot that started the October Revolution. But pen-man-ship?

  SSSQ is my world. The hallways, the staircases, the rooms, are small, but so are we. Four hundred kids, grades kindergarten through eight, marching in two lines, boys and girls, height order. There’s one Hebrew teacher, Mrs. R, middle aged, in large owlish glasses, who likes to make us laugh as she leads us, sticking two hands in front of her nose, making a little flute, and singing, “Troo-loo-loo-loo-loo.” Other than dispensing mirth to scared children, her task is making sure that every boy is wearing his yarmulke. The first, and nearly last, words of Hebrew I learn: Eifo ha-kipah shelcha? (Where is your yarmulke?) That’s the sweet part of the day, being taken to class by Mrs. R. But in class with Mrs. A–Q and S–Z, not so much. Because I don’t know what I’m doing. With my missing scissors and my missing glue and my missing crayons and my missing yarmulke and my missing shirt, the one with the insignia of a guy on a horse swinging a mallet, a polo shirt, I learn much too late, I am also missing. In fact, often I am in the wrong room, and everyone cracks up over that, and I, in my untied shoes, stand up and look around, mouth open, as Mrs. A through Q or Mrs. S through Z goes out to get Mrs. R. And Mrs. R with her light Israeli accent will stand with me out in the hall and ask me, “Nu? What happened?” “I—,” I say. But that’s about all I know: “I.” So she’ll bend down to tie my shoelaces while we both think it over. And then she’ll take me to the right room, and the familiar faces of my classmates will fill up with a new bout of laughter, and the new Mrs. A to Z (but not R) will shout the word that is the official anthem of Solomon Schechter: Sheket! In English, “quiet.” Or, more plaintively, Sheket bevakasha! “Please be quiet.” And everything will fall into its usual state of entropy, students who can’t be quiet, and teacher who can’t teach, as Hebrew, the second language I don’t know, the one that doesn’t even appear on boxes of Honeycomb, bonks me on the head, coconut style. And I sit there, wheezing myself into an asthma attack that won’t come until the weekend, wondering what possibly can happen to me next, as my shoes magically untie themselves, and then it’s recess time, and Mrs. R takes us outside with her sweet troo-loo-loo past hallways with maps of Israel drawn years before the one my parents call “that farkakte Carter” and his Camp David Accords gave the Sinai Peninsula away to the Egyptians, and the walls filled with children’s thank-you notes in bright Magic Marker, thank-you notes to the one who watches over us, the one whose name can’t even be written out fully, he’s so special, the one they call G-d or, sometimes, just to add to the confusion, Adonai. As in Sh’ma Yisroel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.