Little Failure

by Gary Shteyngart

  The terrible marimba of the phone alarm. The fumbling for the toothbrush. The elevator descends with me partly in it. And then they are standing there before me in the busy lobby, two skinny people hemmed in by fat provincial tourists representing several countries. “Hey!” I shout, ready for an embrace.

  “Little son!” my mother shouts. And I am smaller.

  “Little one,” my father says. And I am smaller still.

  “Welcome,” I say, for some reason, in English. And then in Russian: “Are you tired?” And as soon as the first words of Russian—Vy ustali?—get an exit visa out of my mouth I recoil from myself, shocked by hearing my own goofy adolescent bass around my parents. Granted, with my ever-growing American accent, I do not sound entirely native when I govoryu po-russki with cabdrivers, hotel clerks, or even my good Petersburg friends. But right now I sound like a child just getting his mouth around his first Russian words. Or is it because I’m trying to speak to my parents with grown-up authority? Trying, against all reason, to be their equal?

  How much time have I spent in the last twelve years running up and down this exhausted, melancholy city, retracing their steps, trying to somehow make them my own. And then with the first Russian words out of my mouth, I realize the truth of the matter. It’s not possible to make their lives my own. While my mother and father are here, this is their country. And so my responsibilities lighten. And so I realize that what I have to do for the next week is to ignore my own goofy Russian bass and, simply, to listen.

  To the Minnesota tidiness of their room, my mother has added her own tidiness, a system of packing of infinite complexity, so that most of the contents of their three-story house have been condensed and magically transported to the old homeland. Plastic bags beget plastic bags, there are umbrellas, rain jackets, hoods, money pouches, and, from tomorrow’s breakfast table, yogurts, heavy bottles of water, a range of fortifying snacks. She will leave the hotel as provisioned as an astronaut testing the first reaches of an inhospitable planet. In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.

  My mother is in her suburban gray sweatpants, bustling around the hotel room, hours of preparation still ahead of her before we head out to dinner. My father sports his STRIPED BASS CONSERVATION PARTICIPANT cap, a new Banana Republic jacket, and swish sunglasses, looking surprisingly Western by way of eastern Queens. Only the combination of black socks and leather sandals betrays him as a true native of this land.

  Their strength amazes me. After two flights totaling fifteen hours, after lugging their considerable luggage across half the city via buses and metro—they will not spend the money for a taxi from the airport—they are still alert and vital, ready to down 250 grams of vodka at the Metropol restaurant down Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main axis. This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength. Woe be to the sensitive one who requires one milligram of a benzodiazepine just to fall asleep after a journey of a few hundred kilometers taken aboard a peregrine falcon, versus the many thousands they have traveled aboard British Airways’ economy class.

  “Igor, you look good,” my mother says. “Not like you’re tired.”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” my father quickly intervenes, the fur sticking out of his shirt in the approaching twilight. For the longest time, he would wear my clothes, my hand-me-ups from Stuyvesant, all those peacock Union Bay and Generra shirts, so small and weak on his muscular body. “There are terrible circles under his eyes,” my father says, beholding me fully. “And what do you have on your forehead? Those two lines?”

  They are called wrinkles, I want to say, but I do not want to appear mortal in front of him. “I leaned against the seat in front of me on the train,” I lie.

  Throughout this trip, I will capture little instances of my family reflected in shop windows, my parents looking younger than their ages, younger than many of the people around them, while I look at least two decades beyond my years, the dead graying hair, the sunken eyes, and all the imprints from the years of hard living, those two telltale lines cracked into my forehead. How did it happen that I have aged in tandem with the citizens of St. Petersburg, the city in which my parents had reached their own middle age, while they have seemingly reversed time like true Americans?

  My greatest fear: dying before they do. Growing up, it had been the reverse. I couldn’t understand how to be on this earth without them. But now every time I board a plane for some ragged destination, I feel their fear ascend through the air alongside me, the “autistic” vaccinations coursing through my blood.

  “I will wash quickly under the armpits,” my father says, while my mother continues her endless grooming, warning us that “a woman is a long song.”

  Settling in with his clean armpits, my father, the long journey behind him, begins to talk amiably, almost contentedly, about coming “home”: “You know, little son, you could write an entire book about me. I’m not an extraordinary person, but because my life was so varied, all my studies, and jobs in different places, there was much that was interesting.

  “You understand, little son, that just like you, I’m a lonely [odinokii] person by nature. I don’t want to say that I like loneliness. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t.”

  Maybe this is the time for me to say, I love you. Or, better still, I am you. Maybe this is the flip side of the silence I have mastered. The inability to say what needs to be said until it is too late.

  My mother sticks her head out of the bathroom. “Hey, guys!” she says happily. “I was so unattractive. But now I feel refreshed!”

  We are heading up Nevsky Prospekt. The broad Nevsky cuts across the center of St. Petersburg at a northwestern tangent, as if trying to lead the way to Scandinavia. In the times of Gogol and Pushkin most everything happened along this street, from commerce to love to café-scribbled poetry to the choosing of seconds for duels. Today, it is still the place for a long aimless walk from the low-rent Uprising Square to the city’s focal point, Palace Square, where the de-tsared Winter Palace sits on its haunches in a green provincial funk. On Nevsky, chicken is fried in the Kentucky manner, and stores like H&M and Zara will, if given the chance, clothe a newly middle-class person from the shapka on her head to her galoshes.

  St. Petersburg is a sad place. Its sadness lies in a mass grave in its northeastern suburbs along with the 750,000 citizens who died of hunger and German shelling during the 871-day siege, which began in 1941. Petersburg never truly recovered. It is impossible to walk down Nevsky, alone or with my parents, and not feel the oppression of history, the weight on our own family and on every family that has lived within this city’s borders since 1941. CITIZENS! a preserved sign at the northern mouth of Nevsky declares, DURING ARTILLERY BOMBARDMENT THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS THE MOST DANGEROUS. And so it is.

  We are strolling past outdoor patios heaped with sushi and sunlight. Women are already dressed for June’s gentle heat, looking as reproductive as their counterparts in New Jersey, only distinguished by the Orthodox crosses on their lovely bare necks. Indians with cameras press around us, preserving every cornice and portico for their prodigious zip files.

  “This city always bring on sadness,” my mother says. “All of us children were sad growing up. There was a lot of dreaming.”

  “On Rubenstein Street, I had my first love,” my father says. “Right over there.”

  Much as I mercifully lack writer’s block, my mother has never been at a loss for a stray conversational tangent. “Before we left for America,” she says to me, “I went to the Eliseev store to buy you chicken cutlets. There was nothing to eat. So I was told to go to the Store of Children’s Nutrition. I spent two hours standing in line there, and right under my nose, they ran out of cutlets. I came home and I had nothing to feed you.”

  I try to think of the time when I went without chicken cutlets. But all I see is my grandmother G
alya, the one we left behind to die in Russia, dutifully feeding me cheese as I work away on Lenin and His Magical Goose, her meaty beak bent over my efforts.

  “The Coliseum Movie House,” my mother announces. “This was the first time I saw Sophia Loren! The line was around the block. I also saw Divorce, Italian Style. Stefania Sandrelli was playing in it, so there were only these little fold-out seats left. I fell out of my seat from laughing. Can you believe it? That’s how hard I was laughing. Marcello Mastroianni and all that. I was sixteen. Can you imagine that? Almost fifty years ago.”

  “When we get to Liteiny Street, we’ll have a big talk,” my father says.

  I have never been a fan of “big talks.”

  We are approaching Liteiny Street.

  “Little son, let’s go for a moment just down this block. It’s a moment of great sadness.”

  My father seems quite intent on leading me past a pretty young woman smelling a daisy. We are approaching the portico of the cream-colored two-hundred-year-old Mariinskaya Municipal Hospital, one of the city’s largest.

  “I spent time here,” my father says. “In the nervnoye otdeleniye.”

  I run the Russian through my mind. The sky is pressing down on us with a heavy gray lid. The Nervous Department? What exactly is he trying to say? My father was a mental patient? For the first time on this trip, I feel danger. A traveler’s danger. Like when I took the wrong taxi in Bogotá a year ago, speeding away from my hotel instead of toward it.

  “How old were you?” my mother asks.

  “Let’s see. My mother was …” He has to think of her age first, before he can determine his own. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “So I was twenty-three,” he concludes.

  The information hovers in front of me, still in the form of a question. My father was a twenty-three-year-old mental patient? I finger the calming Ativan pill, the lone resident of my jeans pocket. The taxi is still hurtling toward the Colombian jungles, toward the band of rebels who will hold me hostage for decades.

  “So young,” my mother says.

  “I was in the crazy ward,” my father says. “And they thought I would remain a durak [idiot] forever.”

  “This street leads to Pestelya Street, where my friend lived,” my mother says, apropos of nothing.

  “And so, little son,” my father interrupts her, “it’s a long story. I was in the hospital, they performed terrible experiments on me, and I almost died.”

  I make an affirming noise. Uhum.

  “They made me drink buckets of valerian root, bromine, so that I wouldn’t have any male desires.”

  Oho, I say. I cannot even begin to imagine what he’s saying.

  “Uzhas,” my mother says. Horror.

  “And there were real crazy people in there. There was one old guy he would shit himself every week and smear the shit on the wall.”

  “The Tsar’s Pierogi!” my mother reads a passing sign with interest.

  “And he’d scream, ‘Down with Lenin and Stalin!’ ” My mother laughs. “They’d pacify him and then in a week he’d be back at it. We had quiet crazy people, too. I was the quietest.” My mother laughs with her head thrown back. “But I could have been loud. After this they gave me a spravka [certificate] attesting to my stay, and they wouldn’t take me in the army.”

  “But what brought this on?” my mother asks.

  “I was sitting at home, reading a book, and then my mother found me on the floor, foaming at the mouth, convulsions, like an epileptic. That was the first and last time.”

  Ativan in my mouth, I ask the next question: “What was the diagnosis?”

  “Soldering of the vessels in the brain.” As soon as he says it, I think what my psychoanalyst back in Manhattan will soon affirm. The Soviet diagnosis is complete nonsense.

  “When your father proposed to me,” my mother says, “he said, ‘I have a certificate. I have a mental illness.’ And I thought: What a typical Jewish trick. He’s completely healthy. He just doesn’t want to serve in the army. But it turned out it was the truth.

  “We’re so stupid when we’re young. Someone tells you they’re mentally ill, why would you marry him? But I thought, He’s such a smart, serious person. It can’t be. I would notice if he were psychotic. But sometimes, especially as he’s aged, you can see that he really is mentally ill.” My mother laughs. The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it’s been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

  By his early twenties my father has failed his exams and has been kicked out of Leningrad’s Polytechnic Institute. “My mother used to nag me,” he says. “ ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

  “Just like I used to do to you,” my mother says to me, laughing some more. She switches to English: “Failure! Failure! Failure!”

  My father’s eyes dart around his fabulous sunglasses, his teeth are relatively straight and white for this part of the world, his beard is white flecked with gray, as mine is already flecking at an accelerated pace. As an old friend of his had just said to me: “You are an exact copy of your father. You have nothing of your mother’s.” Which is not entirely true. My father has been adjudged more handsome than I. But if the poem I wrote in college, “My Reflection,” can be believed, we are almost brothers. Our brain scans would probably attest to that as well. The Ativan is melting under my tongue, entering the bloodstream.

  Later my father will tell me about another “treatment” he received at the hospital. They puncture his spine with a needle and blast oxygen into it, trying to “unsolder” the blood vessels of his brain. He comes out a wreck, scared of taking the tram, afraid of leaving his room. The middle half of his twenties are a wasteland of depression and anxiety. It is impossible to know what led him to foam at the mouth and convulse in the first place, but my psychoanalyst believes a neurological episode, a grand mal seizure, for example, may have been the cause. Treatments for neurological disorders generally do not include placement in a clinic where psychopaths smear their feces along the wall, injection of oxygen into the spine, and the administration of bromine to fight a young man’s erections.

  I part ways with my parents for the evening. I meet my good friend K in the southern suburb in which he lives. We share a spicy kebab at an Armenian joint. We tell jokes about a certain horse-faced leader in the Kremlin, and I drink as much vodka as I can. He has work tomorrow, but as we embrace and he puts me on a tram back to Uprising Square, I don’t want to leave him. Drunkenly, I watch the city assemble itself outside my tram window, the Soviet giving way to the baroque.

  My father was a mental patient.

  So now I forgive him?

  But it was never about forgiveness. It is about understanding. The whole psychoanalytic exercise is about understanding.

  What did he say when I told him years ago I was seeing a psychiatrist? “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual.”

  But he knows, doesn’t he?

  He knows what it’s like not to have control over yourself. To see the world pass right through your hands.

  Is he trying to settle up with me?

  I wander into the new Galeria mall, a behemoth by Uprising Square, filled with Polo and Gap stores, and all the other purveyors of the Hebrew school clothing I never owned. It’s sad to reach out to past hurts and find nothing there. Just the splash of my sneakers against the cold Galeria marble, the echoes of my footsteps, because at this late hour on a weekday I am practically alone.

  In my hotel room, with my parents just a floor above me, I put my head to my pillow and think of my wife. I think of the warmth of her. I think of the relative silence of her own immigrant family, the silence that I crave. My wife. Even though I am “the writer,” she reads more than I do. She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

  I think of my mother
and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live. A year shy of forty, I feel my life entering its second half. I feel my life folding up. I sense the start of that great long leave-taking. I think of myself on the subway platform at Union Square. I am invisible, just a short obstacle others have to get around. Sometimes I wonder: Am I already gone? And then I think of my wife and I feel the whoosh of the number 6 train, the presence of others, the life still within me.

  Why did he tell me this today?

  The Admiralty building on the banks of the Neva River, headquarters of the Russian navy, has been built in the same loud Empire style as the hospital where my father spent part of his life. The Admiralty, a kind of early-nineteenth-century skyscraper, is topped by a gilded spire itself topped by a small sail warship, which appears regularly on local souvenirs and whose platonic shape delighted me as a child, a golden addendum to the warships in the Chesme Church. To the southwest of the Admiralty building lies the vast central Admiral-teiskii Rayon, a district of initial grandeur and increasing shabbiness. This is where my mother hails from.

  My mother studied and later taught piano. I believe the reverence of music she shared with my opera-obsessed father allowed these two dissimilar people to fall in love. The story of my mother’s introduction to music is slightly different from the story of my first encounter with words at the behest of her mother, Grandmother Galya.

  “When I was five,” my mother says as we exchange the colonnaded riverbanks and canals for the shawarma-reeking depths of her neighborhood, “my father bought me a balalaika that cost forty rubles. This was the last money we had and it was supposed to be used for food. My mother [Grandmother Galya] took the balalaika and smashed it against the wall of our apartment. I started to cry. My mother comforted me by saying, ‘I know you’re crying not because I smashed the balalaika but because you can see how upset I am. You’re very sensitive.’ ”