The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Aha!” Vladimir said. “And your other brother, is he also hiding out in Belize?”

  “He’s at Indiana. A marketing major.”

  “Perfect, then! There’s absolutely no kind of pattern we can discern here.” Vladimir sighed happily. He was getting a little panicky himself. If there was something wrong with Morgan, what hope was there for a Soviet Jew–child like Vladimir Girshkin? She might as well have been saying that Tolstoy was wrong, that all happy families were not alike. “Now, Morgan,” he said, “these panic attacks, would you say they’ve gotten better recently or worse?”

  “Actually, I haven’t had any since I came to Prava.”

  “I see . . .I see . . .” Vladimir clasped his hands together in the manner of Dr. Girshkin contemplating an inquiry from the Department of Health & Human Services. This was a difficult moment in its own right, although it was hard to say why. They were just talking. Two expatriate lovers. No pressure.

  “So now let us recall what your psychiatrist said . . .” Vladimir pressed on. “He said your little panic attacks were some kind of cover-up, that they prevented you from, I believe you said, ‘lashing out.’ Tell me, since you arrived in Prava, have you been doing anything, hmm, to borrow your words, ‘inappropriate’ or ‘vindictive?’ ”

  Morgan thought about it. She looked out over the mythic skyline of the city and then looked to the bare earth. Another of her silent moments, it seemed, was upon them. She was playing with the zipper of her jacket, reminding Vladimir of the Russian word for zipper, molnya, which also meant “lightning.” A pretty word. “Have you been lashing out?” Vladimir prompted her again.

  “No,” she said finally. “No, I haven’t.” Suddenly, she embraced him, and brushing against his prickly cheek he felt the familiar dime-sized hollow at the tip of her chin, an indentation that Vladimir had somehow perceived as being inherently sexual, but now considered a telling imperfection, a little pothole he could smooth over with his love and analytical bearing.

  “There you go, sugar cane,” he said, kissing the giant dimple. “So what we’ve learned today is that your psychiatrist—probably second-rate, anyway; I mean, no offense, but what kind of shrink practices in Ohio?—yes, we’ve learned today that your shrink was completely wrong about everything. The panic attacks did not bottle your anger, did not prevent you from acting irrationally, else how to explain their sudden disappearance here in Prava? Perhaps, if I may infer, what you needed was some fresh air, so to speak, some time away from the family hearth, the alma mater, and—would it be too presumptuous to suggest?—a new love affair? Am I right? Eh? Am I? Of course, I’m right.”

  He shook all over with the manic feeling of being right. He threw his hands up in the air, hallelujah-style. “Well, thank God for that!” he said. “Thank God! So now we will go celebrate your complete recovery at the Stolovan Wine Archive. Yes, the Blue Room, of course. No, people like us do not need reservations . . . What a thought! Come on!” He grabbed her arm and started dragging her down Repin Hill where Jan was waiting with the car.

  She seemed reluctant at first, as if the transition from amateur psychology to a night getting horribly drunk at the Wine Archive was somehow inappropriate. But Vladimir could think of nothing he wanted to do more. A drink or two! Enough of this talking. Panic attacks. Lashing out. The mind was sovereign. Faced with the most horrible circumstances, it could say: No! I’m in charge here! And what were the horrible circumstances in Morgan’s case? A young woman’s unease at the prospect of graduating from university? A mother’s loneliness for her daughter? A father who wanted the best for his boys? Ach, Americans were too keen to invent their own troubles. To paraphrase an old Russian expression, they were wild with their own fat.

  Yes, it was rather disgusting. All through the ride to the Wine Archive, Vladimir was developing a distinct sense of anger toward Morgan. How could she do this to him? He remembered the tent in the forest as if it had happened half a century ago. Normalcy. Arousal. Affection. That was her implicit promise to him. And now this unsettling talk, and now she wasn’t letting Vladimir move into her apartment. Well, screw her. Normalcy was on its way. The familiar plush, almost pneumatic banquettes of the Wine Archive would soon be sighing meaningfully under his ass. Grant Green would be strumming along on the stereo. A bottle of port would be brought over by some ponytailed Stolovan. Vladimir would give Morgan a nice brief lecture on how much he loved her. They would go home and sleep together, drunk impotent sex having a charm all its own. It was settled.

  But Morgan wasn’t through with him yet.

  28. AMBUSH

  AT BIG TOE

  THE STOLOVAN WINE archive was found right by the Foot, in the shadows of the so-called Big Toe. The Toe was the site of daily protests by angry babushkas brandishing portraits of Stalin and jerry cans of gasoline, threatening to immolate themselves on the spot if anyone ever tried to knock down the Foot or cancel their beloved Mexican soap opera, The Rich Also Cry.

  Nu, as far as Vladimir was concerned, the country’s senior citizens needed to keep busy, and their discipline and dedication were kind of cute. The self-proclaimed Guardians of the Foot were divided into several divisions. The feistiest grandmas were out in front, waving their high-concept placards (“Zionism = Onanism = AIDS”) at the patrons of the Stolovan Wine Archive and the local Hugo Boss outlet, the two institutions that ironically thrived astride the Big Toe. Looking at the babushkas’ jowly red faces and subtracting some slack and residual anger, one could almost see them as brownnosing young pioneers back in the forties, plying their teachers with potato dumplings and copies of working-class president Jan Zhopka’s love poems, Comrade Jan Looks at the Moon. Oh, where did the years go, ladies? How did it come to this?

  Behind these chanting grandmas, a lesser cadre was assigned the task of caring for the dachshunds of the agitators, and these grannies also performed admirably, spoiling the tiny agit-pups with bottled spring water and bowls of the choicest innards. Finally, in the third and last rank, the artistic babushkas were building a giant papier-mâché doll of Margaret Thatcher, which they burned voraciously each Sunday while howling the former Stolovan national anthem, “Our Locomotive Hurtles Forward, Forward into the Future.”

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, alighting from a chauffeured BMW in front of the Wine Archive was guaranteed to drive these old folks out of their thick, wooly minds, but then Vladimir always enjoyed getting them a little riled up before ascending the stairs to the Blue Room to slurp down oysters and muscadet.

  They had made their way through the Old Town in silence, Morgan still playing with her jacket’s zipper, rearranging her legs this way and that, rubbing her haunches against the car’s sleek Montana leather. Perhaps she was thinking about what she had said up on Repin Hill, all that nonsense about her panic-stricken university days; perhaps she was finally accepting just how much worse Vladimir’s life had been than hers. He could certainly tell her some stories; that could be an interesting dinner topic right there. Should he start her off with the Wonders of Soviet Kindergarten or go straight to his Floridian adventures with Jordi? “Triumph over adversity,” he would conclude. “That’s the story of Vladimir Girshkin, or else he wouldn’t be here wiping chutney mayo off that button nose of yours . . .”

  BUT THAT CONVERSATION wasn’t to be. Here’s what happened instead.

  Immediately upon their pulling up to the Archive, the car was surrounded by grandmas screaming for blood. The babushkas were livelier than usual today, stirred up by the recent change in weather, the need to keep warm through agitation. Vladimir could make out a few of their chants, including that old chestnut “Death to the poststructuralists!” and the crowd-pleasing “Epicures, go home!” It was remarkable how so many cumbersome words had found a ready home in the mouths of peasants, how communist slogans sounded perfectly similar in any Slavic language.

  Morgan opened her door. There was a moment of relative calm as she made her way out of the auto, a moment Vladimir used to note that Morgan�
�despite all her absurd talk of panic attacks and lashing out—was really just a quiet, steady woman in cheap dress shoes. This realization made Vladimir feel soft-hearted and protective. He was reminded of the Ohio driver’s license he had found in her wallet. Portrait of a high-school girl with a Big Dipper of acne arching across the nose, a teenager’s gloomy hue, shoulders hunched over to conceal the embarrassing contents of a baggy suburban sweatshirt. He felt a new font of tenderness opening up for her. “Let’s go home, Morgan,” he wanted to say. “You look so tired. Let’s get you some sleep. Let’s forget all this.”

  It was too late.

  Just as Vladimir slammed the car door behind them, one of the grandmas, the tallest of the Foot Guardians, a long, canine face, a tuft of chin hair, a red medal the size of a discus around her neck, shouldered her way past her colleagues, cleared her throat, and spit the warm results at Morgan, the sizeable spew floating right past her shoulder to land on the Beamer’s tinted window.

  A gasp of amazement. A German auto worth two million crowns had been so cleverly defaced! The counterrevolution had begun in earnest! History, that slut, was finally on their side. The Guardians of the Foot stood up on their toes, the hero-invalids leaning forward on their crutches. “Speak, Baba Véra!” the crowd encouraged the spitter. “Speak, lamb of Lenin!”

  The Red Lamb spoke. She said but one word. An entirely unexpected, uncalled-for, and decidedly uncommunist word. “Morgan,” Baba Véra said, the English name coming off her tongue rather naturally, both syllables intact. More. Gahn.

  “Morgan na gulag!” another old woman shouted.

  “Morgan na gulag! Morgan na gulag!” the rest of the grannies picked up the war cry. They were jumping now like youngsters on a May Day float—oh, happy days!—spitting freely at the car, tearing at their sparse hair, waving around their spiffy woolen caps, all except for one sad-eyed, bedraggled babushka who was quietly trying to sell Vladimir a sweater.

  What the hell was this? What were they saying? Morgan to the Gulag? It couldn’t be. There must have been a terrible misunderstanding. “Comrade Pensioners!” Vladimir started to say in Russian. “On behalf of the fraternal Soviet people . . .”

  Morgan pushed him back.

  “Stay out of this,” she said.

  “Sugar cane,” Vladimir mumbled. He had never seen her like this. Those dead gray eyes!

  “This isn’t about you,” she said.

  Everything was about him. He was the king of Prava, and she was, by extension, its denim-clad queen. “I think,” Vladimir said, “I think we should go home and rent—”

  But there would be no Kurosawa tonight. In a flash of bared teeth, Morgan had turned on her tormentors. It all happened so fast. The tongue was pressed firmly against the upper palate . . . The letter R was thoroughly trilled . . . There followed several frothy explosions in the guise of Č, Š, and Ž . . .

  The grandmothers pulled back in horror.

  It was as if some devil, some kind of Slavic devil with a horrible American accent, was speaking through Morgan. “Shaker Heights,” Vladimir whispered, trying to console himself with geography. South Woodland Boulevard.

  But he was thinking of someone else, another Morgan, because in place of that warm, nature-loving creature, a far-fetched, worldly one was now shouting at the grandmothers in remarkably fluent Stolovan, dropping the word “polemical” as easily as the real Morgan drove tent stakes into the topsoil.

  “Š mertí k nogù!” the sham Morgan was hollering, her face twisted into unlikely anger, a white-knuckled fist raised in solidarity with some mysterious non-Ohioan life-force. Death to the Foot!

  “Eh,” Vladimir said, instinctively making his way back to the car.

  Meanwhile, Baba Véra, all bad teeth and vitriol, her red Medal of Socialist Labor flapping in the wind, had come snout-to-snout with Morgan and was conveying any number of sentiments Vladimir could not quite make out. The name Tomaš kept coming up and Vladimir assumed blyat’ meant “whore” in Stolovan as well as in his native tongue.

  “Morgan!” Vladimir shouted in exasperation. He was on the verge of asking Jan to start up the Beamer and spirit him away to the Joy or the Repré, someplace full of velvety throw cushions and fuzzy expats, someplace where the entropy factor was nil and everything was primed to go Vladimir’s way.

  Because, to be honest, he could no longer abide this impostor who spoke an obscure Eastern European language, who dueled communist grannies to the death over a hundred-meter galosh, who maintained (sexual?) relations with some mysterious Tomaš, who kept a sealed, secret room in her panelak apartment, and whose life clearly extended beyond dating Vladimir and teaching English to hotel clerks.

  “Morgan!” he cried once more, this time without any conviction.

  And then, just as Morgan was turning to face her befuddled Vladimir, Baba Véra ambled up and pushed her with one gnarled paw.

  Morgan stumbled back a little, there was a moment when her balance seemed lost, but in the end those strong twenty-three-year-old legs kept her aloft. The next thing Vladimir realized was that Jan had somehow made his way between Morgan and the old woman. There was the sound of hard against soft. A shriek. Vladimir’s eyes did not react as quickly as his ears. It took him some time to register the situation on the ground.

  Baba Véra was on her knees.

  There was a collective rumble of disbelief.

  A shiny black object.

  Baba Véra touched her forehead. There was no blood. Just a circle of red, a smaller version of the medal cradled between her breasts.

  The Guardians of the Foot were wordlessly backing away from their fallen comrade. The wiener-dogs were yapping their tiny lungs out.

  Jan lifted up the shiny black object in his hand as if to strike her again, but Baba Véra was too dazed to even flinch. “Jan!” Vladimir said. He could only think of his own grandmother tying a red handkerchief around his neck, feeding him a prized Cuban banana for breakfast. “Jan, no!”

  Jan had hit her with his radar detector.

  IN THE NEXT minute or so, the earth continued to revolve around the sun. Jan continued to tower over the toppled grandmother. Baba Véra continued to kneel before him. Vladimir continued to retreat to the safety of the BMW, although his car was now lost in a different, non-Bavarian dimension. And Morgan . . . Morgan was standing there, chin up, fists curled, nursing her vast and incomprehensible grudge, momentarily silent but ready for more.

  They were all bound up now in a single gesture.

  A FEW MINUTES later Vladimir was dismally eating his oysters, Morgan helping herself to a large pitcher of lukewarm sangria. Vladimir’s personal table was located beneath the Blue Room’s skylight, so that when he looked up he could see a billowy coal cloud settling over the Foot like a flared trouser. It was uncanny: The damned Foot was determined to follow him wherever he went. He felt like one of those blighted rural folk who keep imagining black U.N. helicopters chasing them during their interminable possum hunts.

  The maître d’, a slick, modern man of Vladimir’s age, kept coming by the table to apologize to Morgan and Vladimir “on behalf of all the young Stolovans.” It was he who had ended the showdown at Big Toe, sprinting out of the Wine Archive with a knotted rope and quickly lashing the grandmas into a panicked retreat. “Ah, the old . . . The old are our misfortune,” he said, shaking his head, pausing to check the mobile phone holstered to his belt. “Dear grandmothers! It is not enough that they stole our childhood. Not enough for them . . . Only the whip they understand.”

  Soon a complimentary roast boar was placed between Vladimir and Morgan, but the disturbed Vladimir spent the entrée portion of the meal picking at his laminated teeth, leaving the little pig-carcass to slowly suffocate in juniper oil and truffle foam. He was trying to modulate his anger, guide it toward the realm of sadness, wondering how much of an outburst he could get away with within the dignified sanctum of the Blue Room.

  Only by dessert time, when their deep silence had become m
ore uncomfortable, did Vladimir open his mouth, did he ask her what it meant: Morgan to the Gulag?

  She spoke without looking at him. She spoke in a begrudging tone not terribly different from the tone she employed with the Guardians of the Foot. She spoke in the guise of the Other Morgan, the Morgan who evidently found Vladimir untrustworthy, unsympathetic, or, worse yet, positively irrelevant. Here is what she told Vladimir: She told him that she had a Stolovan friend, his parents jailed under the old regime, his grandparents executed in the early fifties. Once her good friend had taken her to the Foot, and they had a terrible fight with the grandmothers. The babushkas had been itching to purge her ever since.

  Was her friend named Tomaš, perchance?

  She answered his question with more questions: Was Vladimir implying she could not have friends of her own? Did she need his approval now? Or was she obliged to spend all her time listening to Cohen and Plank whine about their fat little lives?

  Vladimir opened his mouth. She was right, of course, but nonetheless he found himself oddly protective of the Crowd. At least a soft and rudderless fellow like Cohen was not capable of betrayal. Cohen was Cohen and nothing more. He had mastered the American art of being entirely himself. And speaking of betrayal, where did she learn such flawless Stolovan?

  She allowed herself a tiny victorious smile and informed him that she had taken many classes in Stolovan at that polyglot Ohio university of hers. Was Vladimir surprised that she could master a foreign language? Did he have a monopoly on being foreign? Did he think her an idiot?

  Vladimir shuddered. No, no. It was nothing like that. He was just asking . . .

  But what Vladimir was doing was this: He was losing her. He was groveling for her reassurance in a scorned lover’s voice. The familiar aphorism “in love there is always someone kissing and someone being kissed” came to mind.