The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “It is you, Girshkin, who have made us into the laughingstock of Prava. And just when we have cemented our understanding with this city’s police. Oh, no, no, friend. Tonight, you ride home with me. And then we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya . . .”

  Cohen must have sensed the malice in his voice, for despite his utter incomprehension of Russian, he made a mooing sound from within his fetal ball. “No!” Vladimir translated Cohen’s mooing into Russian for Gusev’s benefit. He was becoming all the more frightened himself. Just what was Gusev planning to do with him? “Your insubordination is noted, Gusev. If you refuse to call for a taxi, give me the mobile and I will do so myself.”

  Gusev turned back to his men who were as yet unsure whether they should laugh or take this small drunkard seriously, but after Gusev gave them the nod the laughter began in earnest. Smiling solicitously, Gusev began his approach.

  “Do you know what I am going to do to you, my goose?” Gusev whispered to Vladimir, although his thick Russian sibilants were loud enough for the entire block to hear. “Do you know how long it takes to solve a crime in this city when you have friends at Municipal House? Remember that leg they found in the sock bin at the Kmart? I wonder who it was we dismembered that day. Was it his excellency the Ukrainian ambassador? Or was that the day we circumcised the minister of fishing and hatcheries? Would you like me to tell you? How about I look in my log book? Better still, how about I snuff you and your little friend? Why waste a hundred words when one bullet will do between you two pederasts?”

  He was close enough for Vladimir to smell the intense shoe-polish reeking off his motorcycle boots. Vladimir opened his mouth—what was he going to do? Recite Pushkin? Bite Gusev’s leg? He, Vladimir, had done something to Jordi back in the Floridian hotel room . . . He had . . .

  “Opa, boys!” Gusev shouted to his men. “Can you see the article in the Stolovan Ekspress tomorrow? ‘Two Americans Die in Suicide Pact Over Rising Price of Beer.’ What do you think, brothers? Tell me I’m not a funny one tonight!”

  A debate began between Gusev and a gun-toting associate over a proposal to throw the two foreigners off the Foot. Vladimir suddenly found himself strangely weary. His watery eyelids began to close . . .

  With the passing minutes, the voices of the men became gradually indistinct, sounding more like the insistent honking of geese than the rapid hooligan Russian that Gusev’s fellows preferred. And then . . .

  THERE WAS AN unexpected sound. The make-believe sound of a Hollywood fairy tale. The sound of a getaway car squealing around a street corner and swerving into the narrow space between Gusev and his troops.

  Jan got out of Vladimir’s Beamer looking like a domesticated loon in an ensemble of coarse-wool winter pajamas. “I have orders,” he shouted to Gusev and then to the former Interior Ministry troops. “Orders directly from the Groundhog. I’m exclusively authorized to take Girshkin home!”

  Gusev calmly took out his gun.

  “Move aside, sir,” Jan said to Gusev. “Let me help Mr. Girshkin up. As I’ve said, I have orders . . .”

  Gusev grabbed the young Stolovan by his shoulders. He spun him around, then took hold of his pajama collar with one arm, sandwiching the gun into the folds of his neck with the other. “What orders?” he said.

  For some time then, only the churning of his stomach reminded Vladimir of the passing of time, each revolution indicating yet another temporal unit in which he remained alive while Jan remained in Gusev’s grasp. Finally, his driver, not a small man but small beneath Gusev’s inflated face, reached into a leather holster wound beneath his pajamas and, hand shaking only slightly, took out a mobile phone. “The Groundhog has been following your whereabouts on the scanner,” Jan said to Gusev, his usually halting Russian now true and precise. “To speak truthfully, he is worried over Mr. Girshkin’s safety at your hands. If you would like, I will dial the Groundhog directly.”

  The silence continued except for the metallic click of a weapon either being decommissioned or readied for combat. Then Gusev let go. He turned away quickly, leaving the defeat in his face to Vladimir’s imagination. The next thing that registered with Vladimir was the slam of a car door. A dozen motors started up, all nearly at once. A lone babushka, her voice as frail from sleep as from age, had opened up her window from across the street and started shouting for silence or she’d send for the police one more time.

  Arranged horizontally in the back seat of his car, while the propped-up Cohen rode shotgun, Vladimir willed himself to pass out, if not into eternal sleep then at least into a subset of eternity. It was not possible. His head was a Central Casting of acne-scarred skinheads, hysterical policemen, fatigue-clad Interior Ministry braves, and, of course, the odd Soviet customs agent with sturgeon breath.

  “You’ll be back, Yid,” the customs agent had said to Mother.

  PART VII

  WESTERNIZING

  THE BOYARS

  31. STARRING VLADIMIR

  AS PETER THE GREAT

  HE WAS BACK .

  Sure he had given fleeing some thought. And why not? His DeutscheBank account did contain around fifty thousand dollars—his commission from the Harold Green scam—which would last him awhile in someplace Vancouverish. But, no, that would be an overreaction. Not to mention cowardly.

  A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discreetly kick him in the ass.

  A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects history to spare any pretense and kick him directly in the face.

  A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass, the face, and every other place where a kick can be reasonably lodged. Vladimir understood this. His take on the matter was: Victim, stop lazing about in the grass.

  He woke up the next day to find himself lying beside Morgan’s ethereally pale back, the sides of her breasts rounding out beneath her like little pockets of rising dough. His darling was completely unaware of her Volodechka’s curious night.

  His darling was completely unaware of many things. Because no matter what acts of political or romantic inanity she was performing with her Tomaš (likely some impoverished young Stolovan reeking of wet shoes and garlic), no matter the winged lion or minotaur or gryphon that lived in her sealed secret room, and no matter those fashionable American panic attacks that gave her the license to misbehave—ultimately, it would be Vladimir’s world, with its moral relativism, its animalistic worship of survival, that would leave Morgan short of breath.

  In some ways it was a repeat of Vladimir’s grand battle with Fran, a battle between the luxury of ideas and the refugee’s foremost responsibility of staying alive, a battle between nebulous historical notions (Death to the Foot!) and the complicated facts on the ground—the Gusevs and their Kalashnikovs, the men with the shaved heads cruising the streets of the continent. And it was precisely Vladimir’s realism that made him a better person than Morgan, that coated him with the patina of tragedy, that excused his deviations from Normalcy and condemned Morgan’s deviations from the same.

  Was he a good person or a bad person?

  What a childish question.

  HE MOVED.

  Half an hour after he had awoken, five hours after he was nearly killed, Vladimir was at the Groundhog’s. Didn’t call, didn’t knock, just came and made himself known—let the whole world know who is this Girshkin that he doesn’t have to call or knock.

  Visiting his boss was now a crosscultural experience. The Hog had left the “gangsta” compound, along with his latest girlfriend and secondary and tertiary consorts, for a new development hideously developing itself in a green corner of Greater Prava: the Brookline Gardens. Those familiar with the real Brookline, the one in Massachusetts, would not be disappointed. The Prava version was the apotheosis of North American upper-middle-classdom distilled in ten rows of dark brick townhouses and archwa
ys trellised with vine. An enormous sloping lawn at the entrance had been planted with pink, red, and white peonies to spell out “Welcome” in English; while in a far corner, a self-contained Food Court was already under construction, spreading out its feelers for the rest of the hypothetical mall. The only concession to local reality was the fact that the whole place would fall apart by the turn of the millennium.

  Into this rarefied habitat came Vladimir with arms crossed and scowl at the ready. Peerless Jan (knighted, beatified, given a sweet bonus) dropped him off at the Groundhog’s unit on the corner of Glendale Road and MacArthur Place. The entrepreneur’s bodyguards were asleep in a station wagon parked in the driveway, their arms hanging out of the rolled-down windows like pinstriped tentacles. As promised, Vladimir did not knock. He walked right through the empty living room, his mobile phone at the ready, its antenna fully extended like a modern-day broadsword, to find the Groundhog breakfasting in his little breakfast nook.

  The Groundhog looked up from his cornflakes. “Ah! Surprise!” he said, although that was clearly not what he meant, unless he was describing his own state of affairs. “Bozhe moi!” he said, which was closer to the truth. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s got to stop,” Vladimir said. He pointed his phone’s antenna into the triangle of flesh and hair laid bare by the Groundhog’s bathrobe. “I can be on a plane for Hong Kong tomorrow. Or Malta. I have a thousand schemes. I have a million connections.”

  The Groundhog tried to appear incredulous. He came closest to the expression of Mr. Rybakov’s portrait directly above him. The middle-aged Fan Man, dressed in full military uniform, was trying to look dignified for the photographer, but already the lunacy of Soviet life was evident in the feral glint of his eyes, as if he was trying to say, “Put away your camera, civilian! I’ll give you something to remember me by!”

  “Vladimir, stop,” the Groundhog said. “What is this madness?”

  “Madness! Would you like to hear about madness? A convoy of armed ex–Interior Ministry troops in jeeps running around an almost-Western city, this to me is madness. Their commanding officer threatening the life of the vice president of a major investment company—this, once again, to me is madness.”

  The Groundhog grunted and stirred his cereal. For some reason he had been eating it with a heavy wooden ladle, the kind more suited for a bowl of thick Russian porridge than American cornflakes. Through a pair of French doors slightly ajar, a woman’s rosy backside could be seen cavorting about the wood-and-chrome kitchen beyond the breakfast nook.

  “Okay,” the Groundhog said, presumably after his stirring had rearranged the cornflakes just so. “What do you want from me? You want these Americanisms and globalisms? You want to take control? Then do so! Gusev won’t give you any problems. I can take away his jeeps and guns like that . . .” He forgot to snap his fingers. His eyes were glued to the service end of Vladimir’s mobile and they looked tired and dim, as if the only thing still keeping the Groundhog awake was the possibility of the antenna poking him in the eye.

  “I want training sessions on becoming an American businessman for everyone in the organization,” Vladimir said. “Starting tomorrow.”

  “Exactly as you want it, that’s how it will be.”

  Vladimir tapped his antenna against the dining table, a half-moon of ashwood and computer-perfected design. It seemed that something remained unresolved, and, lost as he was in the Groundhog’s flurry of concessions, Vladimir couldn’t quite remember what it was. “Oh,” he said finally. “We’re opening a nightclub.”

  “Wonderful,” the Groundhog said. “We could all use a nice disco.” He looked thoughtful for a minute. “Vladimir, please don’t hate me,” he said, “but if we are talking truthfully, then I must speak from the heart. Vladimir, my friend, why are you so distant from us? Why don’t you ever spend time with your Russian brothers? I’m not talking about Gusev and his kind, but what about me, what about the Groundhog? For instance, they tell me you have an attractive American girlfriend. Why have I not seen her? I love to see pretty girls. And why haven’t we gone out together, you and your girl and me and my Lena? There’s a new restaurant with an American flavor they’re opening here at the Food Court next month. It’s called Road 66 or something like that. Surely your girl will feel at home in such a place, and my Lenochka loves milkshakes.”

  This indecent proposal floated in the air between them, finally settling on the ergonomic dining table between the corn flakes and the Air France coffee mug. A double date. With the Groundhog. And Morgan. And a creature named Lenochka. But before Vladimir could politely refuse the Groundhog’s invitation, a second consideration presented itself: Morgan to the Gulag! He was thinking, of course, of revenge. Revenge for Morgan’s Foot fetish, revenge for her homicidal babushkas, revenge for her slippery Tomaš. Yes, the time had come to teach his pampered little agitator a few useful facts about the cruel and hollow universe around her. And so—a double date! A little sampler of Girshkin World. A proper antidote to the Shaker Heights High School prom. My Dinner with Groundhog.

  “You know, my girl is actually very curious about my Russian friends,” Vladimir said.

  “So then we’re agreed!” The Groundhog happily slapped his shoulder. “We will toast her American beauty together!” He turned to the French doors leading to the kitchen and moved them apart with his feet, both shod in forest-green Godzilla slippers. “Have you met my Lena yet?” he asked, as more of his friend’s back became visible. “Would you like her to make you some porridge?”

  BACK IN HIS Panelak flat, Vladimir paced his living room in a kind of angry stupor. Globalisms? Americanisms? What the hell was he talking about? Did he actually think he was going to introduce Gusev to the finer points of business-to-business marketing and public relations? What insanity!

  The way things stood, only one man in Prava could help him. František. The happy apparatchik Vladimir had found during the Night of Men.

  “Allo,” František picked up. “Vladimir? I was just about to ring you. Listen, I need to unload three hundred Perry Ellis windbreakers. Black-and-orange trim. Practically new. My cousin Stanka made some sort of an idiotic deal with a Turk . . . Any ideas?”

  “Er, no,” Vladimir said. “Actually, I have a bit of a problem here myself.” He explained the nature of his predicament in a loud, frightened voice.

  “I see,” František said. “Let me impart some advice. And remember, I’ve dealt with Moscow all of my adult life, so I know Gusev and his friends pretty well.”

  “Tell me,” “Vladimir said.

  “The Russians of this caliber, they only understand one thing: cruelty. Kindness is seen as a weakness; kindness is to be punished. Do you understand? You’re not dealing with Petersburg academicians here or enlightened members of the fourth estate. These are the people that brought half this continent to her knees at one point. These are murderers and thieves. Now tell me, how cruel can you be?”

  “I have a lot of anger in store,” Vladimir confessed, “but I’m not very good at expressing it. Today, however, I lashed out at the Groundhog, my boss—”

  “Good, that’s a good start,” František said. “Ah, Vladimir, we are not so different, you and I. We are both men of taste in a tasteless world. Do you know how many compromises I have made in my life? Do you know the things I have done . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” Vladimir told the apparatchik. “I do not judge you.”

  “Likewise,” František said. “Now, remember: cruelty, anger, vindictiveness, humiliation. These are the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Master them and you will do well. Tell these people how much you despise them and they will build you statues and mausoleums.”

  “Thank you,” Vladimir said. “Thank you for the instruction. I will lash out at the Russians with my last strength, František.”

  “My pleasure. Now, Vladimir . . . Please tell me . . . What the hell am I supposed to do with these goddamn windbreakers?”

  THE AME
RICAN LESSONS began the next day. The Kasino was set up school auditorium–style, with rows upon rows of plastic folding chairs. When the seats were filled, Vladimir did a double take: the Groundhog’s people numbered as many as parliamentarians of a sizable republic.

  Half of them Vladimir had never met. In addition to the core groups of soldiers and crooks, there were the drivers of the BMW armada; the strippers who supplied labor to the town’s more elicit clubs; the prostitutes who worked the Kasino and, in lean times, covered the nightly beat on Stanislaus Square; the cooks for the common mess-hall who ran an international caviar-contraband operation on the side; the young men who sold enormous fur hats with the insignia of the Soviet Navy to Cold War aficionados on the Emanuel Bridge; the petty thieves who preyed upon older Germans straying from their tour groups—and that was only the personnel Vladimir could identify by their distinguishing combination of age, gender, demeanor, and gait. The majority of the congregants remained to him just so many other units of Eastern European refuse in their cheaply cut suits, their nylon parkas, their rooster haircuts, and teeth blackened by filterless Spartas, three packs per diem as life prescribed.

  Forget Gusev. Forget the Groundhog. From now on they would all belong to Vladimir.

  Vladimir took them by surprise. He ran out from the wings and kicked the oakwood lectern that had been stolen from the Sheraton and still bore its illustrious seal. “Devil confound it!” he shouted in Russian. “Look at you!”

  The general incredulity and merriment that had pervaded the gathering stopped right there. No more giggling, no more loud slurping of the imaginary last drop out of an empty Coke can. Even old Marusya woke up from her opium nap. Gusev, seated alone in the last row, was glowering at Vladimir and fingering his holster. His troops, however, had been moved up front with the Groundhog. Yes, thought Vladimir, smiling at Gusev imperiously. Now we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya . . .