The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  He noted their clothes. Some were dressed in the flannels, which, Vladimir had noticed, were spreading by way of Seattle during his last month in the States. But the glam-nerd look, Francesca’s most tangible gift to Vladimir, was in evidence as well. The shirts way too tight, the sweaters too fluffy, the glasses too horn-rimmed, the hair coiffed either with seventies’ extravagance or fifties’ restraint. But look how much younger than Vladimir these specimens were! Twenty-one, twenty-two, maximum. Some probably couldn’t get served in American bars. He was old enough to be their teaching assistant.

  Nevertheless, he would persevere. Wisdom came with age. Already, Vladimir could see himself declared an elder statesman. Another way to look at it: Despite their relative youth, the nouveau-nerds were hobbled by their unremarkable suburban demographics, while Vladimir, as a former New Yorker, was a freak by nature. But he was not the only freak. Others who tried particularly hard to stand out included Plank, a thin and nervous man who carried a yapping bite-sized dog—some kind of cross between a Chihuahua and a mosquito—in a little homemade pouch that was wrapped with silver lace. Women passing by took turns telling him how cute his dog was, its grimy, sorry little head constantly peeking out from its mobile home like a furry earflap with two eyes. But Plank, true to the game, wouldn’t smile or acknowledge them beyond a nod, knowing how out-of-season such sentiments could be. Cohen told Vladimir that Plank bred these customized minidogs in his panelak for the old Stolovan ladies, but Plank did not warm to Vladimir, stating: “There’s not much money in it, you know.” Oof, was that an antibusinessman slur? Did he not realize that Vladimir’s true love was the muse?

  Vladimir did better with Alexandra: tall, slender, dark-haired, with a round, full Mediterranean face and a small, intelligent curve of bosom. In fact, she was (dare Vladimir think it) not unlike Francesca except her face was too conventionally pretty with its high cheekbones and long natural lashes stretching upward in two parabolas. With Fran you had to find the beauty and fall in love with the blemishes, while Alexandra’s ready-made good looks seemed the perfect physical match for Cohen. The way Cohen’s eyes were firmly fixed on the silhouette of her body, sheathed in nothing but a tight-fitting black turtleneck extending into matching hose (no glam-nerd threads for her, thank you), certainly confirmed as much on his part.

  Before Vladimir could be formally introduced, Alexandra grabbed his head and pressed the furry thing into the soft, bare crux of her neck. “Hi, honey!” she said. “I’ve heard all about you!” She had? But how? Vladimir had only met Cohen three hours ago.

  “Come! Come with me!” She draped her arm around his and was leading him toward a kind of Art Nouveau tapestry hanging from a velvet wall—long swirls of multicolored swan feathers encircling what seemed to be a stylized Pietà. Yes, dear old Art Nouveau, thought Vladimir. Thank heavens, Abstract Expressionism and Co. had slain that gaudy beast. “Look! Look at this!” Alexandra shouted in her throaty, smoky voice. “A Pstrucha!”

  A what? Oh, who cares . . . She was heavenly. That collarbone. You could see it through the turtleneck. She was like a swan herself. Red lipstick, black turtleneck. A haiku right there.

  “Are you familiar with Adolf Pstrucha? I’ve got Pstrucha on the mind. Look at my book bag. Look at it!” It was, indeed, crammed with a dozen or so colorful books on the P-fellow. “Now Pstrucha wasn’t really Stolovan. He belonged to Slovene Moderna. Are you familiar with Slovene art? Oh, my dear boy, we must take a trip to Ljubljana. You mustn’t deprive yourself any further. Anyway, our man Pstrucha was practically laughed out of Prava. It was such a reactionary place in the early 1900s, the shithole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But . . .”

  She lowered her head conspiratorially and brushed her collarbone against Vladimir’s shoulder, so he could feel the immense weight of it, her body armor, her naturally occurring breastplate. “But personally I think the Stolovans were laughing at his name. Pstruch. It means ‘trout’ in Stolovan. Adolf Trout! It’s too much! Don’t you agree? Say, have you ever been trout-fishing? I know you Russians love to fish. I went fishing in the Carpathians with this French guy who knows Jitomir Melnik, the prime minister, and I just know the frog would be interested in your PravaInvest. Would you like me to introduce you? Would you like to have dinner? Or we could do lunch if you’re busy. Or, nowadays, I’m trying to wake up in time for breakfast.”

  Yes, yes, yes. Yes on three counts, Vladimir thought. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then maybe we can take a nap together. No, best to keep her awake and talking. Her words, so soft, so light, the consistency of a flan . . . Vladimir wanted to reach over and eat her conversation. Follow it right into her little mouth. But, horror of horrors, Alexandra had a boyfriend, or what passed for one—a chubby Yorkshire fellow named Marcus who looked like he could have been a rugby player before all this Eastern Bloc a-go-go stuff happened. While Alexandra pleasantly queried Vladimir on his writing (“About your mother? Oh, how interesting!”), her boyfriend loudly attacked the café’s other patrons with his hip Briton-on-the-edge routine (Wot? Wot did you say? C’mere y’cunt!), eliciting forced laughter from Cohen and Plank. It was clear that everybody looked up to this Marcus runt; they looked up to him because he was dating Alexandra, the crown jewel of Prava.

  Then there was Maxine, introduced as a student of American culture, dressed entirely in polyester and sweating accordingly in the warm caffeine haze of the Nouveau. Her short hair had been gelled into one blond upward-pointing clump that seemed ready to take off for the stars, and she had moist blue eyes that looked at everything, including Vladimir, with amazement. She was also a diplomatic conversationalist, talking to everyone in turn, first Cohen, then Plank, then Marcus, then Alexandra, then finally Vladimir. “I’m writing a treatise on the mythopoetics of Southern interstates,” she said to him. “Have you ever been?”

  Vladimir liked her expressiveness and the warmth of her hand. He told her of his experiences with Midwestern interstates. How driving behind the wheel of his Chicagoan girlfriend’s Volvo in college he had nearly killed a family of chipmunks. It was a safe and pointless conversation, certainly safer than Vladimir’s driving, until gutsy Vladimir dared ask her why, as a self-proclaimed student of American culture, she was living in Prava. She lifted her latte to cover her mouth, and mumbled something about needing distance. Ah, good old distance.

  Overall, Vladimir felt he scored well at the café portion of the popularity contest, despite Marcus and Plank’s uniting to grumble about rich little pissers, meaning, well, Vladimir. But Vladimir would not succumb. His mental reflexes, sharpened by the afternoon’s initial sparring with Cohen, saved the day once more as he announced what he planned to do with his riches. Why, of course, he was going to start a literary magazine. Cohen at first seemed offended at not being told of the endeavor beforehand, but soon the whispers of “lit mag” suffused the room and, before they knew it, the regulars at Cohen’s corner were doing their condescending best to shoo away the literary hopefuls at the gates.

  Vladimir, still amazed at his own idea, played it down. How the hell was he going to sell this one to the Groundhog? But then he remembered that the students at his Midwestern college used to have not one but two literary magazines, so how hard would it be to start up a little press in Prava? Besides, they were already doing glossy brochures for the “company.” It wouldn’t take too much more to print up a few hundred copies of something half-decent on the side. “Does anyone have editorial experience?” he asked his new crowd. Of course they all did.

  AFTER THEY HAD drunk enough coffee to keep them floating at an arm’s length from the ceiling for a week, the crew retired downstairs where a primitive-looking disco was pounding out something not entirely avant-garde. “How Cleveland,” sneered Plank at last year’s music, yet no one turned their backs on the scene (was there any alternative?), venturing instead to their own rickety side table, one of many bracketing the amorphously shaped dance floor. “Beer!” cried Maxine. And soon bottles of Unesko lined
the table—an additional line of defense against the bodies moving without grace or surety in the revolving police-car beams and the lethargically thumping strobe lights. “This is all we have,” Plank said to Vladimir, Vladimir having clearly grown on him since the announcement of the literary magazine. “I hope you weren’t expecting New York on the Tavlata.”

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do about that,” said the emboldened Vladimir. “Yes, we shall see.”

  Alexandra was tugging on his ear, anxious to give him a census of the place. “Look at the backpackers! Look how big they are! Oh, that frat-hog with the Ohio State T-shirt! Oh, he’s priceless!”

  “What’s their function?” Vladimir said.

  “None,” Cohen said, wiping beer off his chin. “They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushkas like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus.”

  “And where are our people?” Vladimir shouted to Alexandra above the din.

  She pointed around to the back tables, which, Vladimir now realized, were reserved for their fellow artists, slopping beer calmly amid the suburban feeding-frenzy.

  An ambassador from one of those tables, a tall young buck in a Warhol T-shirt, brought a sleek blue water pipe filled with hashish. Vladimir was now introduced as “magnate, talent scout, poet laureate, and publisher.” They smoked the sweet and peppery hash, refilling the pipe enough times for their fingers to become brown and sticky, for this was the moist and lethal kind of hash that could only result from Turkey’s proximity. The fellow offered it to Vladimir for six hundred crowns a gram, but Vladimir was too tweaked to deal with both crowns and the metric system. He bought two thousand dollars’ worth anyway and made another lifelong friend in the process.

  There was little he would remember after the hashish entered the picture. There was the dancing with Maxine and Alexandra and possibly the boys. A wide swath of floor was cleared of backpackers by brown-shirted disco personnel, and Vladimir’s crowd was invited to get up and boogie. At this point a serious fracas broke out. A sorority sister crying foul jumped on Vladimir, of all people. Stoned beyond capacity, Vladimir thought he was being romanced, what with all that sweet-smelling American flesh around him and a pair of manicured claws dug into his sides. Only when Alexandra started to drag the sister off by the hair did Vladimir realize that he was at the center of some kind of class antagonism.

  She did this hair-pulling with aplomb and Vladimir, free of his burden, must have thanked her profusely because he remembered her saying “Aww” in the purple-gray-green haze of disco lights and hash smoke, and kissing him on both cheeks. Then he felt good about the whole clumsy incident since it had further polarized the crowd into “us” versus “them” and in the space of one short evening he had placed himself squarely in the “us” column of the register.

  Then, sometime during the taxi ride up to his compound, he remembered poking the dozing Cohen and trying to point out the city below, its floodlights put out, but the yellow moon still traveling along the bend of the Tavlata, the airplane warning lights blinking off the cuff of the Foot, a lone Fiat huffing its way past the silent embankment. “Perry, look at how beautiful,” Vladimir said.

  “Yes, good,” said Cohen and fell back asleep.

  Finally, he was looking up at the walls of his panelak castle, remembering how imposing Casa Girshkin had seemed during the high school days of returning from Manhattan late at night, intoxicated, incoherent, and unresponsive to his ever-vigilant mother’s queries in both Russian and English. He walked into the lobby where Gusev’s men had fallen asleep, some with their playing cards still in their hands. Empowered by the smell of the lobby, he crawled upstairs in search of his bed, missing his floor twice. At last he found his room, then his bed.

  She was a pretty one—Alexandra, he thought, before sprinkling himself with minoxidil and quietly passing out.

  21. PHYSICAL CULTURE

  AND HER ADHERENTS

  NOBODY WOKE HIM up. Ever. Not only had Vladmir forgotten to pack his alarm clock but the Groundhog and the human tentacles of his vast apparatus were apparently still nice and cozy in bed with their girlfriends and rifles till well into the afternoon. Kostya, it turned out, spent his mornings in church.

  Vladimir found out this ecclesiastical tidbit on his fifth Prava day. He woke up late to what might have been an explosion at one of the Paleolithic-era factories lying low against the velvet horizon, but it could have very well been an explosion within Vladimir himself—last evening’s pivo and vodka and schnapps had arranged themselves as unfortunate bedmates in his stomach and Vladimir was forced to heave all over the sterility of his prefab bathroom, the lecherous peacock grinning knowingly from the shower curtain. Vladimir noticed the fowl had on a tight pair of boxer shorts in the hues of the Stolovan tricolor and had an avian bulge to boot.

  The previous night, the third installment of the Café Nouveau saga, had left Vladimir gripping for the side of his body where he imagined his liver lived out its troubled existence, and so he put on a New York Sports Club T-shirt (they had canvassed the Emma Lazarus Society for membership—as if anyone had the money!) with the vain hope that he could be made fit by the power of suggestion. He walked down to the empty Kasino, hoping Marusya, the perpetually drunk old lady behind the counter, was dispensing cigarettes and her special hangover brew. She was not.

  Kostya, however, was there, wearing a jogging suit fluorescent enough to put the peacock to shame, and a heavy gold chain with cross and anatomically correct Jesus weighing down nearly to his stomach. “Vladimir! What a beautiful day! Have you been outside?”

  “Have you seen Marusya?”

  “You don’t need her on a day like today,” Kostya said, tugging at his Christ. “Give your lungs a break, I say.” He looked closely at Vladimir’s T-shirt, until it appeared to Vladimir that his scrawny self was under examination and he hunched forward his shoulders in defense. “Sports club,” read Kostya out of sequence. “New York.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “No, you’re very lean, you must jog.”

  “I’m just naturally a very healthy man.”

  “Come with me,” Kostya said. “There’s space behind the houses. We’ll jog. You’ll build lower-body strength.”

  Lower body? Meaning what—below his mouth? What kind of talk was this? Of course, his Chicagoan girlfriend back in the Midwestern college had made him run around a very sophisticated, computer-monitored field—their school’s concession to its athletic fringe-element. “You’ll thank me for this someday,” his former girlfriend used to say. Aha. Thank you, darling. Thank you for the gift of pain and sweat.

  But then Kostya placed one of his beautiful paws, fingernails carefully trimmed, on Vladimir’s shoulder and led him out like a rebellious cow that had taken too much to the dank, moldy confines of her barn, into the hazy sunshine and sickly grass of early-autumn Prava.

  Here it was very dacha-like: weeping willows wept under the weight of the tetra-hydro-petra-carbo whatever-the-hell-it-was being belched out of the smokestacks; postcommunist rabbits bounced about lethargically as if fulfilling some demented party directive nobody had bothered to rescind; and Kostya beamed like a farmer glad to be back after selling grain in the city. He unzipped his jogging suit to reveal a chest bereft of hair, and said things like “oooh,” “bozhe moi,” and “we’re in God’s country now.”

  There was a clearing. An oval path of sand had been splashed about, probably by the jogging enthusiast himself, and the sun, free of the willows, burnt down upon the scene mercilessly. If there is a hell on this earth . . . thought Vladimir to himself, covering his burning head with his palm in an effort to prevent the minoxidil from burning off, if such a thing was possible. Now what?

  “To stand around is pointless!” shouted Kostya, negating centuries of Russian peasant wisdom, and then began to run like a madman around the sandy path. “Onward! Onward!
”

  Vladimir lamely broke into a trot. There was something one had to do with the arms; he looked to Kostya who was raising dust across the field and tried to purposefully strike the air, left, right, left, right. Christ. Perhaps he should have finished college just to avoid this madness. But then college graduates were often conscripted to play racquetball in Wall Street gyms. Although there was always social work . . . for quiet people who liked the shade.

  He went around, three years added to his life per every lap completed. He grasped for the thin Stolovan air. He felt sweat as thick as shampoo separating his skin-’n’-rib body from his flimsy cotton tee. He felt globs of mucus coagulate in his defective lungs while he hobbled from one foot to the next like one of those awkward Floridian birds.

  Kostya slowed down to keep pace with him. “So? Do you feel it?”

  “D . . . Da,” Vladimir affirmed.

  “You feeling good?”

  “D . . . Da.”

  “Better than ever?”

  Vladimir cringed and waved his arms to indicate his inability to talk. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” hollered his tormentor. “Now, which Greek said that?”