The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “PravaInvest could dynamite the Foot,” Vladimir volunteered, momentarily forgetting his corporation’s unbearable lightness of being.

  “It’s very costly,” Kostya cautioned him. “The Foot is right at the base of the Old Town. If you don’t use the explosives just right, you’ll blow half the city into the Tavlata.”

  If PravaInvest couldn’t do it, then Vladimir vowed to mentally erase the Foot from his line of sight, even as it imposed its galosh-like shadow over the architectural grace of the cityscape.

  Yes, giant foot aside, Prava continued to do its golden act beneath him, and then it dawned on Vladimir that this Prava was not without its charm; that while it was no Weltstadt like, say, Berlin, it was no shitty Bucharest either. Consequently, what if the Americans here were more the sophisticated Fran-and-Tyson variety than the deluded Baobab kind? Vladimir’s stomach grumbled with worry. Kostya, as if he had sensed Vladimir’s concerns, said: “A pretty town, yes? But New York must be still more beautiful.”

  “Are you joking?” Vladimir said. They skipped a series of red lights and careened onto the tram rails of a bridge connecting the two parts of the city. Sparks flew and their driver cursed the Stolovans once more for their bloody infrastructure.

  “Well,” said Kostya, ever the diplomat, “but New York must be bigger.”

  “That’s right,” Vladimir said. “It’s the biggest.” But he was not reassured.

  They swerved off the embankment and into a street lined with stately Baroque dwellings in various stages of disrepair yet still wearing their ornamentation, their gables and coats of arms standing out like the flounces on a worn Hapsburg gown.

  “Stop here,” Kostya said. The driver slammed into the nearest stretch of sidewalk.

  Outside, Vladimir did a little dance of happiness, a sort of cross between the jitterbug and the kazachok, feeling he could trust Kostya with this momentary lapse of reason. The Russian smiled sympathetically and said, “Yes, it’s a beautiful day.”

  They found a café, one of the many from which white plastic tables reached out to the sidewalk, the tables covered with pork, dumplings, beer, and surrounded by Germans. Indeed, there were tourists everywhere. The Germans formed entire phalanxes of cheerful, drunk Swabians and purposefully striding Frankfurters. Teams of dazed Munich grandmothers on church trips staggered out of pubs to trample the yapping dachshunds being walked by their angry Stolovan counterparts: the babushkas. Upon first sight of them, Vladimir felt a kinship with these wizened survivors of both fascism and communism, whose city was clearly no longer their own, and who stared contemptuously from inside their meager headscarves at their bejeweled neighbors from across the border. He could easily picture his own grandmother in their place, except she would never consent to owning a hungry dog, preferring instead to feed her son extra portions.

  But the Germans, although ubiquitous, were not alone. Clusters of stylish young Italians glided down the boulevard, trailing Dunhill smoke in their wake. A knot of Frenchwomen with identical buzz-cuts stood before a café menu, eyeing it skeptically. And finally Vladimir heard the sing-along of an American family, large and solid, arguing over whose turn it was to carry the goddamn video camera. “But where are the young Americans?” he said to Kostya.

  “The young ones don’t take the tourist route too often. Although you do see them on the Emanuel Bridge, singing and begging for money.”

  “We don’t want the basket cases,” Vladimir said.

  “Well, I do know of a popular expatriate café for you,” Kostya said, “but first we should celebrate your arrival with a drink. Yes?”

  Yes. They picked up the drinks menu. “My God,” Vladimir said, “fifteen crowns for a cognac.”

  Kostya explained to him how that amounted to fifty cents.

  A dollar was thirty crowns? Two drinks for a dollar? “Yes, of course,” said Vladimir Girshkin, the all-knowing international businessman. “Allow me to treat you,” he added magnanimously. And he took it further, thinking: at an allowance of two thousand dollars a week, he could budget four thousand drinks for himself. Of course, he couldn’t get too greedy, he would have to buy a lot of people a lot of booze, and then there were taxis and dinners and whatnot, but still, five hundred drinks a week was not such an unreasonable figure.

  A waiter, his face as droopy as a dachshund’s, wearing the familiar oversized purple jacket and a Prussian mustache, dragged himself over to their table. “Dobry den’,” he said. It was the same greeting as in Russian, Vladimir noted cheerfully. But then Kostya said a mouthful of words that only vaguely resembled the Russian version of “Can we have two cognacs, please.”

  They drank. A group of Italian schoolgirls marched down the street, waving some sort of crowing-rooster puppets at them. A pair of the bronze nymphs took their time passing by Kostya and Vladimir’s table, looking at each of them in turn with their great round eyes two shades darker than the cognac. The embarrassed Russians quickly turned away to face each other, then snuck furtive glances as the Italian girls rounded the corner. “So you said you had a relationship with an extraordinary American woman in New York,” Kostya said, his voice atremble.

  “Several women,” Vladimir said nonchalantly. “But one was better than the others, as I suppose is always the case.”

  “True,” said Kostya. “It has always been my dream to go to New York and find the nicest woman there and to live with her in a big house on the outskirts of town.”

  “It’s always best to live in the center,” Vladimir corrected him, “and the nicest woman is hardly the most interesting. It’s a question of balance, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Kostya said, “but for children it’s best to find someone nice, and to hell with the rest.”

  “Children?” Vladimir said and laughed.

  “Sure, I’ll be twenty-eight next spring,” Kostya said. “Look,” he bent his head forward and pulled at the gray hairs clumped together at the center of his crown. “Now, of course, I would like a woman who will go with me to the symphony and the museum, and, if she insists, to the ballet. And she should be well-read, too, and like children, of course. And be able to keep house, for I’d like a big house, as I’ve said. But this is not too much to expect from a beautiful American woman such as the one you described, I don’t think.”

  Vladimir smiled politely. He raised two fingers to the passing waiter and pointed at their empty glasses. “So have you anyone in Petersburg?” he said.

  “My mother. She’s all alone. My father’s dead. She’s dying slowly. Cirrhosis. Emphysema. Dementia. Her pension comes out to thirteen dollars a month. I send her half my paycheck, but I still worry. Maybe I should move her out here someday.” And here Kostya sighed the familiar sigh of Vladimir’s Russian clients at the Emma Lazarus Society; the lung-emptying sigh that comes with a lead weight attached to the neck. The flaxen-haired gangster had gone quite soft on his mama.

  “Do you ever think of going back to Russia?” Vladimir said, wishing instantly he could retract those words because the last thing he wanted was for Kostya to leave.

  “Every day,” Kostya said. “But I could never find anything in Petersburg or Moscow that pays quite so much. The mafiya is certainly over there . . .” Kostya paused, as they both reflected upon that single, unmentionable word. “But it’s much more dangerous. Everyone’s ready to reach for their guns. Here, things are calmer, the Stolovans are better at keeping order.”

  “Yes, the Groundhog certainly seems like a pleasant individual,” Vladimir said. “I doubt that there’s anyone bent on causing him harm. Or his associates.”

  Kostya laughed, twisting his tie around his fingers like a little boy given his first clip-on. “Are you trying to ask me something?” he said. A second, uninvited round of cognacs had arrived. “Truthfully, there are some Bulgarians who aren’t terribly happy about how he’s cornered the high end of the strippers’ market, but these are just little grudges that can be solved with a few bottles of this . . .” He lift
ed his glass. “No need for the bullets.”

  “None,” Vladimir said.

  Kostya looked to his watch. “I must go to a meeting,” he said. “But we should do this regularly. Oh, and also, do you run?”

  “Run?” Vladimir said. “Like to catch a bus?”

  “No, to build physical endurance.”

  “I don’t have any physical endurance,” Vladimir said.

  “Well, it’s settled then. Next week we’ll go running. There’s a nice little trail in back of the compound.” They shook hands, and Kostya wrote down directions to the expatriate place on a napkin. It was called Eudora Welty’s. Then, true to form, the energetic young man got up and ran down the street, rounding the corner in no time.

  Vladimir yawned spectacularly, finished off his cognac, then waved the waiter over for the bill, which came out to a little over three dollars. It was time to meet the Gringos.

  20. THE

  WRITER COHEN

  BY THE TIME he found the subterranean Eudora’s, Vladimir was already lost in the vast gastronomical abyss between lunch and dinner. Six souls remained in the restaurant’s cavernous digs, which suggested the place was once something other than the Cajun expat emporium it had become—perhaps a torture chamber where Catholics and Hussites hanged each other by the nose hairs from the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Now the only sign of tortured religiosity was the one advertising seared monkfish on a bed of fennel.

  A waitress came to meet Vladimir. She was young, nervous, American, with a short, grizzly haircut, and dressed in some kind of kilt. She had the bad manners to call Vladimir “hon,” as in “Have a seat, hon.” She was Southern, too.

  Vladimir perused the menu and his compatriots in late dining. To his immediate left was a table of four women and a dozen empty beer bottles. The women were dressed for the seventy-degree weather in engineer boots, corduroys, and T-shirts of various gloomy hues: hospital dun, narcolepsy gray, the black of the void. They talked so softly that Vladimir was unable to catch a single word despite their proximity, and they all looked terribly familiar, as if they had gone to Vladimir’s Midwestern college. He felt the urge to sneeze out the school’s name to see if he would get a response.

  The remaining customer was a beautiful fellow: slender and pale, broad-shouldered and leonine with a bell-curve mane of heavy light-brown hair that was surely the sign of a healthy organism. If scholars of beautiful people could raise any objections to this gentleman it might be the slightly aquiline nose—what does the lion need of the eagle?—and also the awkward fuzz covering his chin that made it possible to imagine his physiognomy with either a real beard or no beard, but certainly not with this sad moss.

  The fellow was scribbling away in a notepad, the requisite empty beers were lined up on the table, his cigarette was on autopilot, smoking away in the grooves of the ashtray, and now and again his gaze would travel the restaurant, casually brushing past the table populated by the opposite sex.

  Vladimir ordered a dish of pit-barbecued pork and a mint julep. “And what’s the beer everyone’s drinking here?” he asked the waitress.

  “Unesko,” she said and smiled. He had betrayed himself as a newcomer.

  “Yes, one of those too.”

  He rummaged his satchel for his thick, shaggy notebook, a holdover from college: a poem here, a stab at fiction there. He threw it down so that its spine would ring against the table, then did his best to seem impervious to the stares of the women’s table and the young Hemingway across the room. He took out his marble Parker, embossed with the logo of Mother’s corporation, and he smiled at it. Or rather, to it.

  To those who have observed Vladimir throughout the years, it would have appeared his standard smile, the weight of it sunk into his jutting lower lip and the hazy, peaceful green eyes. But Vladimir (through reading too many bad novels, perhaps) believed that a smile could convey an entire story if only he sighed and shook his head with good humor at the right moments. In the instant case, Vladimir hoped this smile would say, “Yes, we have been through a lot together, this pen and I. We have kept each other from falling apart through all the strange, self-inflicted years. Portland, Oregon; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; then, of course, Sedona, Arizona. Maybe Key West. Hard to remember. Lots of barely functioning cars, women who didn’t care, bands that fell apart because the personalities involved were just too strong. And through it all: the pen. Writing. I am a writer. No, a poet.” He had heard that poetry had cachet here. Everybody was rhyming, jazz clubs were branching out into poetry slams. But then he had to distinguish himself . . . “I am a writer-poet. No, a novelist-poet. But for a living I make investments. A novelist-poet-investor. Plus I do dance improv.”

  Vladimir was smiling at his pen for too long now. Enough with the pen already. He lowered himself into a poem. It was a poem about Mother; it came easy, Mother lent herself well to verse. His two drinks arrived and the waitress smiled at his efforts. Yes, they were all in this together.

  He was making good time, describing how his mother looked in a Chinese restaurant, using such imagery as “a small string of pearls from her birthland,” which had scored good marks from a comparative literature professor back at the Midwestern college. Then tragedy struck. His globetrotting pen ran out. Vladimir shook it as gracefully as he could, then started aheming to the Eudora Welty’s other artist-in-dining. The fellow would not respond, lost (or pretending to be lost) in work, he narrowed his eyes and shook his head at the words before him as if they were his undoing. He bunched up his mane with both hands then let it unravel—it unraveled very elegantly, like a Chinese fan. He sighed and shook his head with good humor.

  The women’s collective, however, responded by hushing their already subsonic conversation. They looked at Vladimir and his pen with great mystery and worry as if they were lost tourists confronted with a spontaneous native dance on a street far from the safety of their Hilton. Vladimir picked up his beer, his sole credential, and walked over to the women. “Pen?” he said.

  One woman had a purse; she opened it and tore through a ream of facial tissues, new and used. She stole frightened glances at her compatriots until one of them—the blond spikes of her porcupine-cut bristling with authority—spoke up for her: “She doesn’t have a pen.” The others nodded.

  “You need a pen?” It was the writer. He had pressed his lager against his cheek, which Vladimir took to be an international symbol of good will by way of mild inebriation.

  “I need a pen,” Vladimir said, feeling the drama was about to come to a head. He crossed over to the writer mumbling thanks to the women for their effort (no response), and accepted a ballpoint. “Damn thing ran out,” Vladimir said.

  “A writer carries two!” the writer barked. “Always.” He put the beer down and, with his round and cratered chin held high, appraised Vladimir as would a grade school principal his most bumbling charge.

  “That one ran out too,” Vladimir said, although his strained voice pronounced him guilty—guilty of packing only one pen. “I’ve been writing too much today.”

  Too much writing? Too much was never enough. Now it seemed for certain his idiocy would do him in, but instead the writer said: “Write anything good?”

  “This poem about my Russian mother in Chinatown,” Vladimir said, trying to exoticize himself with as many ethnic references as possible. “But I’m just not getting it right. I came here, came to Prava, to get enough distance and I’m still lost.”

  “How’d you get a Russian mother?” the writer asked.

  “I am Russian.”

  “Shhh.” They looked around. “The barmaid is Stolovan,” the writer explained.

  A pair of uneven saloon doors separated the bar area from the rest of the joint; the Russophobic Stolovan was somewhere behind those doors. Vladimir looked down to his feet in embarrassment and took a swig of his beer in lieu of something to say. Yes, he was definitely starting to lose ground with all the fits and starts afflicting his attempts at conversation wit
h the literary god. He decided, against his best instincts, to take a stab at honesty, that mortal enemy of the pyramid schemer. “I just got here,” he said. “I’m still a little out of it as far as the locals go.”

  “Forget about them,” the writer said. “This is an American town. Why don’t you sit down? Come on, take a break from your Russian mommy poem for a second. Oh, don’t look so sore. Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage. Trust me, the maternal teat will still be there tomorrow morning.”

  And then Vladimir knew he was going to like this guy. The helpful instructions about always having two pens, the worldly attitude toward the Stolovans, and now the learned appraisal of the maternal teat, all confirmed that the writer was what the uninitiated would call an asshole. But Vladimir knew these pretty castoffs of well-to-do America, cruising along on their five-year plan of alcoholic self-discovery, then trolling desperately for a five-year renewal option. Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage. What disarming aggression. It was Midwestern progressive college redux, confirmation that this Adonis was definitely in Vladimir’s cards, his “Patient Zero.”

  Vladimir took a seat just as a second mint julep was brought out by the waitress, smiling soberly at her countrymen’s meeting of the minds. Vladimir polished off his first beer and placed it on the outgoing tray. “Another?” she said.

  “Please.”

  “Nuts?”

  “No nuts.”

  “Lemon?”

  “Sans lemon.”

  “On me,” said the writer, impressed by the brevity, the honesty of the exchange. Now they were in Raymond Carver territory. “Drinking up a storm?” he said to Vladimir as the latter reached for the julep.

  “Jet lag. I’m out of it,” Vladimir said. Think. Carver dialogue. Deceptively simple yet profound. “I haven’t got it all together yet,” Vladimir said, as he looked away mysteriously.