The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

“So it is true,” she said in a voice of complete exhaustion, a voice Vladimir remembered from their early American days, when she would run home from her English and typing lessons to make him his favorite Salad Olivier—potatoes, canned peas, pickles, and diced ham tossed with a half-jar of mayonnaise. Sometimes she’d fall asleep at the table of their tiny Queens flat, a long knife in one hand, an English-Russian dictionary in the other, a row of pickles lined up on the chopping block, their fate uncertain.

  “What do you mean?” Vladimir said presently. “What is true?”

  “Vladimir, how can I say this? Please don’t be cross with me. I know you’ll be cross with me, you’re such a soft young man. But if I don’t tell you the truth, will I be fulfilling my motherly duties? No, I will not. The truth then . . .” She sighed deeply, an alarming sigh, the sigh of exhaling the last doubt, the sigh of preparing for battle. “Vladimir,” she said, “you walk like a Jew.”

  “What?”

  “What? The anger in his voice. What? he says. What? Walk back to the window now. Just walk back to the window. Look at your feet. Look carefully. Look at how your feet are spread apart. Look at how you walk from side to side. Like an old Jew from the shtetl. Little Rebbe Girshkin. Oh, now he’s going to scream at me! Or maybe he’s going to cry. Either way, he’s going to hurt his mother. That’s how he repays his lifelong debt to her, by tearing her to shreds like a wolf.

  “Oh, poor, poor Challah. Do you know how sorry I feel for your girlfriend, Vladimir . . . Think about it, how can a man love a woman when he despises his own mother? It can’t be done. And how can a woman love a man who walks like a Jew? I honestly don’t see what keeps you two together.”

  “I think many people walk the way I do,” Vladimir whispered.

  “Maybe in Amatevka,” Mother said. “In the Vilnius ghetto, maybe. You know, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person. Come here! No? He’s shaking his head like a little three-year-old . . . You don’t want to? Well, just stand there like an idiot, then!”

  Vladimir was looking at her drawn and tired face, a residue of anger still pulsing along the upper lip. She was waiting for him, her patience ebbing, a slender laptop perched by the bedside urgently bleating for her attention. He wanted to comfort her. What could he do?

  Perhaps, he resolved, perhaps he could improvise his own kind of love for his mother, cobbled together from past memories of an earlier mother—a harassed Leningrad kindergarten teacher and her love for her half-dead boy, the Soviet patriot, the best friend of Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe, the ten-year-old Chekhovian.

  He could take her twice-a-day phone calls, pretend to listen dutifully to her screams and sobs, while holding the receiver several centimeters away from his face as if the telephone itself could explode.

  He could lie to her, tell her he would do better, because even the invention of the lie meant he knew what was expected of him, knew that he was failing her.

  And, undoubtedly, he could do one other thing for her.

  It would be the least he could do . . .

  VLADIMIR WALKED OVER to his mother, his feet a pair of Hebraic automatons steadily crossing the crisp parquet, wishing that he could Jew-walk his way back to Manhattan.

  “Show me how it’s done,” Vladimir said.

  Mother kissed both his cheeks and rubbed his shoulders, poking with her index finger at his spine. “Straighten up, sinotchek,” she said. My little son. He had been out of her good graces too long: that one word made him wheeze with pleasure. “My treasure,” she added, knowing he would belong to her for the rest of the day, never mind the 4:51 train to Manhattan. “I’ll teach you how it’s done. You’ll walk like me, an elegant walk, everyone knows who they’re dealing with when I walk into a room. Straighten up. I’ll teach you . . .”

  And she taught him. He took his first baby steps to her delight. It was all in the posture. You, too, could walk like a gentile. You had to keep your chin in the air. The spine straight.

  Then the feet would follow.

  PART II

  GIRSHKIN

  IN LOVE

  6. THE RETURN OF

  BEST FRIEND BAOBAB

  SEVEN YEARS AFTER graduating from an elite math-and-science high school along with his best friend Vladimir Girshkin, Baobab Gilletti looked very much the same. He was a pale redhead of admirable physique, although the demise of a teenager’s metabolism had left him with a new coat of fat, which he constantly tugged at, not without a sense of pride.

  Tonight, having returned pink and glowing from his Miami narco-adventures, Baobab was educating Vladimir about his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Roberta. How she was so young and promising. How she wrote avant-garde film scripts and acted in and around them. How she was doing something.

  The boys were sitting on a broken mohair couch in the living room of Baobab’s Yorkville tenement, watching little Roberta squirm into a tight pair of jeans, her bare legs as veined as a newborn’s, her mouth full of braces and Wild Bordeaux lipstick. It was too much adolescence for Vladimir, who tried to look away, but Roberta waddled up to him anyway, her jeans around her ankles, and shouted, “Vlad!” kissing his ear and deafening him with her pucker.

  Baobab examined his girlfriend’s salaciousness through an empty brandy snifter. “Hey, what’s with the jeans?” he said to her. “You’re going out? But I thought . . .”

  “You thought?” Roberta said. “Oh, you must tell me all about it, Liebschen!” She rubbed Vladimir’s grizzly cheek with her own, watching with pleasure as the young man giggled and tried, unconvincingly, to push her away.

  “I thought you were staying home tonight,” said Baobab. “I thought you were writing a critique of me or a response to my critique.”

  “Idiot, I told you we’re filming tonight. See, if you ever actually listened to me, I wouldn’t have to spend half the day banging out critiques and denunciations.”

  Vladimir smiled. One had to give points to this youth willing to carry on a fight dressed in Baobab’s gamy boxers, jeans draped around the ankles.

  “Laszlo!” Baobab shouted. “You’re filming with Laszlo, am I right?”

  “Peasant!” she shouted back, slamming a bathroom door behind her. “Sicilian peasant!”

  “What? Come again?” Baobab turned in the direction of the kitchen and the breakables. “My grandfather was a parliamentarian before Mussolini! You Staten Island whore!”

  “Okay, okay,” Vladimir said, taking hold of one approaching Popeye arm. “Now we go, we have a drink. Come, Garibaldi. Here are your cigarettes and your lighter. We go, we go.”

  THEY WENT. A cab was hailed to haul them to Baobab’s favorite bar in the meat-packing district. A few years hence this tattered part of downtown would catch the eye of the barbarian hordes from Teaneck and Garden City, and later become a bona fide hipster playground, but for now it was all but abandoned at night—a fitting locale for Baobab’s favorite bar.

  The Carcass had an authentic pool of blood at the entrance, courtesy of a neighboring hog-slaughtering outfit. One could still see the conveyor belts that transported the heifers of yesteryear running along the length of the Carcass’s ceiling. Below one could also be as anachronistic as needed: put some Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox, whip out a stick of beef jerky, ruminate out loud on the contours of the waitress, or watch a trio of emaciated graduate students standing around the pool table with their cue sticks at attention, as if waiting for funding to appear. The usual crowd.

  “So?” They had both asked the question. Bourbon was on the way.

  “This Laszlo person is a problem?”

  “Damn Magyar poser’s trying to screw my baby girl,” Baobab said. “Weren’t the Hungarians part of the Great Tatar Horde originally?”

  “You’re thinking of my mother.” Mongolka!

  “No, I assure you, this Laszlo’s quite the barbarian. He has that international odor. And his personal pronouns are
a mess . . . Yes, of course I know how I sound. And if I was a girl aged sixteen and had the opportunity to tango with some putz who had groomed Fellini’s dog, or whatever Laszlo’s claim to fame is, I’d sign up in a Budapest minute.”

  “But has he actually made any movies?”

  “The Hungarian version of The Road to Mandalay. Very allegorical, I hear. Vlad, have I ever told you that all love is socioeconomic?”

  “Yes.” Actually, no.

  “I’ll tell you one more time then. All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible. Roberta is younger than me, I’m more experienced than her, she’s smarter than me, Laszlo’s more European than her, you’re more educated than Challah, Challah’s . . . Challah . . .”

  “Challah’s a problem,” Vladimir said. The waitress was arriving with the bourbons, and Vladimir looked to her pleasant figure—pleasant in the Western sense, meaning: impossibly thin, but with breasts. She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream. Also, the waitress had no hair on her head, an arrangement Vladimir had warmed to over the years, despite his fondness for rooting his nose through musty locks and curls. And finally, the waitress had a face, a fact lost on most of the patrons, but not on Vladimir who admired the way one overdone eyelash stuck miserably to the skin below. Pathos! Yes, she was a high-quality person, this waitress, and it saddened Vladimir that she wouldn’t look at him in the least as she served the bourbons.

  “Perhaps these . . . Oh, I will not succumb to your lingo. Okay, fine, perhaps these gradients in status between Challah and myself are no longer enough to arouse me.”

  “You’re saying you’ve come too close together. Like a marriage.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m not saying! There, you see how your nonsense gets in the way of conversation? I’m saying I don’t know what the hell’s going on in her head anymore.”

  “Not much.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “But it’s true. Look, you meet her, you’re fresh out of your Midwestern collegiate disaster with that lean, mean Vlad-eater, what was her name? You’re back a confused little eeemigrant in New York, the little Girshkie-wirshkie, woo-choo-choo, Girshkie-wirshkie . . .”

  “Asshole.”

  “And then, whoosh! A casualty of the American Dream, par excellence. She gets whipped for a living! For God’s sake, there’s not even the need for symbolism. Enter Girshkie, his compassion, his broken heart, his twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary waiting to be shared, and off we go from submission to dominance, and let’s not forget hugs, talks, walks—my God, this guy just wants to help. But what’s in it for the Good Samaritan, huh? Challah’s still Challah. Not terribly interesting. Kinda large there—”

  “Now you’re resigned to being mean to make yourself feel better.”

  “Not true. I’m telling you what you already know inside. I’m translating it from the Russian original.” But he was being mean to make himself feel better. It was Baobab, after all, who had introduced Challah to Vladimir. The meeting took place at Bao’s Righteous Easter Party, an annual event lousy with students from City College, where Baobab was a lifetime scholar and purveyor of Golden Moroccan hashish.

  Challah was sitting in a corner of the host’s bedroom on a beanbag, staring first at her cigarette and then into her ashtray and then back at her disintegrating conversation piece. Baobab’s bedroom being a fairly large (although windowless) affair, the guests had crammed themselves neatly into the corners, leaving plenty of open space for guest appearances.

  So, in corner number one there was Challah, alone, smoking, ashing; in corner number two we have a pair of engineering students, a heavyset and demonstrably gay Filipino practicing hypnosis on a very loud and impressionable man half his age (“You are Jim Morrison . . .I am Jim Morrison!”); corner number three—Roberta, who had just entered Baobab’s life, being purposefully rubbed down by Bao’s history professor, a ruddy Canadian hoser; and, finally, corner number four, our hero Vladimir trying to have an intelligent discussion with a Ukrainian exchange student on the topic of disarmament.

  The guest appearance was Baobab’s. He came in dressed like the Savior, did a little number with his crown of thorns, some indecent exposure courtesy of his loincloth, got some good laughs out of everyone including Challah who was wrapped into herself in the corner, a huddle of dark cloth and Satanic jewelry. Then he fondled Jim Morrison and, in turn, his hefty hypnotist friend, tried to extricate Roberta from the clutches of the academy, and finally sat down next to Vladimir and the Ukrainian. “Stanislav, they’re making toasts out in the kitchen,” Bao said to the Ukrainian. “I think they need you.”

  “That’s Challah, a friend of Roberta’s,” Baobab said after the Ukrainian had left.

  “Challah?” Vladimir was thinking, of course, of the sweet, fluffy bread served on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.

  “Her father’s a commodities trader, lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and she works as a submissive.”

  “She could play Magdalene to your Christ,” sneered Vladimir. Nonetheless, he went over to introduce himself.

  “Hello,” Vladimir said, plunking himself down in her beanbag nest. “Do you know I’ve been hearing your name all night?”

  “No,” she said. Only she didn’t say it in mock modesty, such as done with a flourish of the arms and a stretch of the word: “Naaaaaawh.” Instead, it was just a quiet syllable, perhaps one could even read some plaintiveness into it, which surely Vladimir did. Her “no” meant that no, he hadn’t been hearing her name all night. Hers was not a name like that.

  Is it possible: Love at first word? And with the first word being “No”? Here one should suspend disbelief and answer affirmatively: Yes, in post–Reagan/Bush Manhattan with its youth pierced, restless, weaned on flashing image and verbally disinclined, it is possible. For with that one word, Vladimir, who had been out of love with himself ever since his ignominious flight from the Midwest, recognized a welcome substitute for self-love. After all, here was a woman who was alone and apart at parties, who worked as a submissive, who, he suspected, allowed herself extravagance only in dress, but otherwise knew that her world had limits.

  In other words, he could love her.

  And even if his suspicions proved wrong, he was still—it is necessary to admit this—aroused by the thought that foreign hands were upon her body, intent on hurting her, while at the same time wondering what kind of sex they could have together, and what he could do to change her life. And she looked cute, baby fat and all, especially in that unholy get-up. “Okay,” he said, knowing to tread lightly. “I just wanted to meet you, that’s why I came over.” Oh, Vladimir, gentle pick-up artist!

  But meet her he did. Clearly it had been a while since a man had talked to her at length and with a minimum of intimidation (Vladimir the foreigner was himself intimidated). The next nine hours were spent talking, first in Baobab’s bedroom, then in a nearby diner, and finally in Vladimir’s bedroom, about their twin escapes—Russia & Connecticut—and within twenty-four hours they were discussing the possibility of further escape, together, into a circumstance where they could at least provide each other with dignity (that exact word was used). By the time Vladimir was ready to kiss her it was already ten in the morning. The kiss was meager yet affectionate, and following the kiss they fell asleep on top of each other, sleeping well into the next day.

  BACK AT THE carcass, Baobab was still going on about Vladimir’s problems in his Baobab way. But Vladimir had just one more thing to say on his own behalf: “Is it true that it could be over with Challah? Can I really end it on my own?” He answered the question himself. Yes, yes. To end it. It had to be done.

  “Yes, the break-up,” Baobab said. “If you want my expert help, if you want me to write an essay or something, just ask. Or better yet, let Roberta handle it. She can
handle anything.” He sighed.

  “Yes, Roberta,” said Vladimir, bent on imitating the cadence of Baobab’s speech. “I’m beginning to see, Bao, that just as I must solve my problems by myself, so you must be a man and do something about the Roberta situation.”

  “Something manly?”

  “Within reason.”

  “Challenge Laszlo to a duel? Like Pushkin?”

  “Can you be more successful than Pushkin? Can you see yourself using a side arm, accurately shooting the Tatar, hmm . . . ?”

  “Vlad! Are you volunteering to be my second? That’s awfully white of you. Come, let’s kill that bastard.”

  “Paff!” Vladimir said. “I won’t take part in this insanity. Besides, you said we were going to drink the night away. You promised me early liver failure.”

  “Your friend is reaching out to you, Vladimir,” Baobab said, putting on his crumpled fedora.

  “I’m useless in a confrontation. I’ll just be an embarrassment to you. In fact—”

  But Baobab cut him off by executing a low bow and heading for the door, the ill effects of his battered hat now visibly compounded by his stupid engineer boots. Poor guy. “Hey! Promise me no fisticuffs,” Vladimir shouted to him.

  Baobab blew him a kiss and was gone.

  It took a full minute for Vladimir to register the fact that he had been abandoned, left without a drinking partner on a boozy Sunday night.

  Without a drinking partner, Vladimir continued drinking. He knew many Russian songs about drinking alone, but the tragicomic import of their stanzas could not dissuade him from a volley of bourbons and the single gin martini that managed to sneak in, its three crisp olives tinkling in a shapely glass. Tonight we drink, but tomorrow . . .a long stretch of sobriety in which Vladimir would wake up with a clear head and deal knowingly with immigrants. Such fascinating people. How many of his contemporaries, for instance, got to meet the likes of Mr. Rybakov, the Fan Man? And how many could inspire his confidences?