The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “We’ve really done it, beloved countrymen,” Vladimir shouted, his whole body shaking from the adrenaline building up ever since the first ray of sun snuck in through the blinds and woke him, irrevocably, at 7:30 in the morning. “We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of all of Europe, we have truly shown our simple nature . . . For seventy years, we have been diligently licking clean an asshole, and it turns out to have been the wrong one!” Silence except for a spurt of laughter on one side, but one quickly nipped in the bud by surrounding colleagues. “What can account for such a gaffe, I ask you? We gave the world Pushkin and Lermontov, Tchaikovsky and Chekhov. We’ve embarked thousands of gawky Western youths on the Stanislavsky Method, and if truth be told, even that damned Moscow Circus is not half bad . . . So how do we now find ourselves in this situation? Dressed so ludicrously, a provincial from Nebraska would have cause to laugh, spending all our money on elegant cars just so we can butcher their insides with our bad taste, our women dressed in raccoon furs strolling Stanislaus Square giving all that young girls can give—their very girlhood—to the same Germans at whose hands our fathers and grandfathers perished in defense of the Motherland . . .”

  At this mention there was predictable patriotic fervor among the ranks: bearlike rumbles of discontent, spittle hurtling to the concrete floor, and, here and there, mutterings of “disgrace.”

  Vladimir picked up on this. “Disgrace!” he shouted. His mind was still ringing with František’s lecture on the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Cruelty. Anger. Vindictiveness. Humiliation. He took out a pocket pack of Kleenex, the only item in his vest pocket, and threw it on the floor for effect. He spat on it, too, then kicked it clear across the stage. “Disgrace! What are we doing, friends? While the Stolovans, the very same Stolovans who we ran over in ’69, are out there building townhouse condominiums and modern factories that work, we’re snipping Bulgarian balls like radishes! [laughter] And what did the Bulgarians ever do to deserve this, may I ask? They’re Slavs like us . . .”

  (Slavs Like Us: The Vladimir Girshkin Story. Thankfully the crowd was too agitated to make light of Vladimir’s lack of Slavonity.)

  “Well, you’re going to learn and you’re going to learn the hard way what it means to be a Westerner. Remember Peter the Great shaving Eastern beards and disgracing the Boyars?” Here he looked, just a glance, at Gusev and his closest men, who barely had the time to react. “Yes, I suggest you review your history texts, for that is exactly how it will be done. Those who are not with us are against us! And now, my poor, simple friends, here’s what you’re going to do first . . .”

  And he told them.

  IT WAS A day commemorating the transition from November to December, with the local trees hanging on to the last of yellow, the leaden sky cut with lines of ethereal blue where the whipping winds had cleared a swath through the pollution. The Russians, dressed in the black-and-orange Perry Ellis windbreakers that Vladimir now required of all employees, were sitting around the clearing (the same clearing where Vladimir and Kostya staged their athletic drills) like a ring of dark butterflies. In the background, an armada of twenty BMWs and a dozen jeeps were being cannibalized by a team of German mechanics in smocks.

  Out came the zebra-striped seats, the woolly cup holders, the shocking Electric Plum ground effects—all tossed water-brigade–style past a line of bobbing blond heads and into the circle of the clearing. There, the personal offerings to the God of Kitsch were already assembled: the nylon tracksuits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog’s vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War–losers—all would be kindling for the flames.

  As those lowest on the totem pole splashed gasoline across this burial ground of rosy-cheeked nesting dolls and giant lacquered soup ladles, some of the older women—Marusya, the opium lady, and her clique, in particular—began to whimper and make soft clicking sounds of regret. They wiped their eyes and adjusted each other’s head scarves, often collapsing into mournful embraces.

  In a matter of seconds, the fire began its crackling susurrations. Then something unstable (perhaps it was the giant can of brilliantine with which Gusev’s men slicked back their thinning hair) exploded with a trace of orange into the darkening sky, and the crowd gaped at the pyrotechnics, the more adventurous young men bringing their hands forward for warmth.

  The Groundhog, sighing with the entirety of his soft chest, took an impressive swig out of his vodka flask, then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out the two fuzzy dice that had previously bounced one against the other from the rearview mirror of his BMW, like two puppies with just each other for amusement. He rubbed them together as if to create another fire, then sunk his nose inside one of them. After a few minutes of this melancholia, the Hog leaned back, smiled, closed his eyes, and cast both dice into the flames.

  THROUGHOUT THE PROCEEDINGS in the auditorium and in the woods, those of an inquiring nature could turn around to see an attractive middle-aged gentleman with a PravaInvest visitor’s tag sitting apart from the herd and doodling in his little memo pad. In a white shirt and corduroy vest, with a gentle, bemused expression on his face, he appeared rather harmless. And yet despite the organization’s closely followed axiom that harmless people should always be sent to the hospital, no one dared approach this strange professorial man who chewed on his pen and smiled for no reason. He was more than harmless. He was František.

  And he was impressed. “Brilliant!” he said to Vladimir, leading him away from the clearing and toward a wrecked suburban highway where Jan and the car were waiting. “You really are Postmodern Man, my friend. The bonfire and the self-denunciation contest . . . I must say, you are clown and ringmaster all at once! And thank you for helping me get rid of those infernal windbreakers.”

  “Ah,” Vladimir said, clasping his hands to his bosom. “You don’t know how happy you’re making me, František. I can’t tell you how incomplete I was without you. I’ve been working on this stupid pyramid scheme for four months, and all I could get was a paltry quarter million out of some daft Canadian.”

  Jan opened the car door and the two slipped onto the warm back seat. “Well, that will soon change, young man,” František said. “I have only one curious problem . . .”

  “You have a problem?”

  “Yes, my problem is that I am a sufferer of visions.”

  “You suffer from visions,” Vladimir repeated. “I can recommend a doctor in the States . . .”

  “No, no, no,” František laughed. “I am a sufferer of good visions! For instance, last night I had this dream . . . I saw a local congress hall being rented out for a caviar brunch . . . I saw a promotional film about PravaInvest broadcast on a screen of enormous proportions . . . By morning, I dreamed of twenty such brunches at five hundred persons per brunch. Ten thousand English-speakers, roughly one-third of the present expatriate population. All the children of mamas and papas from happier lands. All potential investors.”

  “Aha,” Vladimir said. “I see such wonders as well, but I don’t quite understand how this film will be financed.”

  “Now, it is fortunate for you,” said František, “that I have friends in this nation’s vast and underemployed film industry. Furthermore, my chum Jitomir manages a gargantuan conference center in the Goragrad district. As for the caviar, well, I’m afraid you’re on your own regarding the caviar.”

  “No problems there!” Vladimir said and he acquainted František with the international caviar-contraband venture the Groundhog’s men had put together. As he divulged the dark and grainy details, the weather outside the car turned fickle, playing first with a palette of loose baby-pink clouds, then clearing the canvas to sear the approaching Golden City with brilliant sunshine. Each brightening and darkening made Vladimir all the more excited, for it confirmed that change was on the way. “Dear God!” he cried. “I believe we are ready to proceed!”

  “No, wait,” František said. “That was
hardly the sum of my visions,” he said. “I see more. I see us buying an industrial plant. A failed one, of course.”

  “There’s one I’ve seen on the outskirts of town,” Vladimir said. “The Future Tek 2000. That one looked like it failed a century ago.”

  “Yes, yes. My cousin Stanka bought a piece of the Future Tek. It’s a chemical plant that not only failed a century ago but actually exploded last year. Perfect. I must have supper with Stanka. But I see still more. I see that night club we talked about . . .”

  “I see that, too,” Vladimir said. “We’ll call it the Metamorphosis Lounge in deference to Kafka and his mighty grip on the expatriate imagination. ‘Lounge’ is also a popular word these days.”

  “I hear Drum N’ Bass music. I see a soft, fuzzy, highbrow kind of prostitution. I feel something up my nose. Cocaine?”

  “Better still,” Vladimir said, “I have learned of a revolutionary new narcotic, a horse tranquilizer, which we can get in bulk by way of a French veterinarian.”

  “Vladimir!”

  “What? The horse tranquilizer is too outré?”

  “No, no . . .” František’s eyes were still closed; the veins on his forehead were bulging with high concepts. “I see us listed on the Frankfurt Stock exchange!”

  “Bozhe moi!”

  “I see NASDAQ.”

  “God help us.”

  “Vladimir, we must act soon. No, forget soon. Today. Right now. This is a magical moment for those of us lucky enough to be in this part of the world, but it is no more than a moment. In three years Prava will be history. The expat crowds will be gone, the Stolovan nation will become a Germany in miniature. Now is the time to be alive, my young friend!”

  “Hey, where are you taking me?” Vladimir asked, suddenly aware that they had crossed the New Town and were going to some mysterious burned-out district beyond.

  “We’re going to make a movie!” František cried.

  VLADIMIR’S FAVORITE Cold War coincidence? The uncanny similarities between the Soviet architectural style of the eighties and the cardboard sets of Star Trek, the grand American kitsch program of the sixties. Take, for instance, the 1987-built Gorograd District Palace of Trade and Culture which František had procured for his weekly caviar brunches and for screenings of PravaInvest: The Movie. Captain Kirk himself would have felt at home in this giant approximation of a twenty-fifth-century radiator. He would have plopped himself down on one of the orange plastic space chairs, which filled the auditorium’s starry interior, then looked on in exaggerated horror as the enormous viewing screen crackled to life, the voice of a fearsome enemy space creature announcing the following:

  “In its six years of existence, PravaInvest, s.r.o., has become, by far, the leading corporate entity to arise from the rubble of the former Soviet Bloc. How did we do it? Good question.”

  So now the truth would be revealed!

  “Talent. We’ve united seasoned professionals from industrialized Western nations with bright and eager young specialists from Eastern Europe.”

  There they were: Vladimir and an African actor in a golf cart, swinging by an enormous white wall on which the words FutureTek 2000 were printed in futuristic corporate script. The wall ended and the golf cart pulled into a grassy field where happy workers of many ethnicities and sexual orientations cavorted beneath an ever-rising inflatable phoenix, PravaInvest’s rather shameless corporate symbol.

  “Diversity of interests: From modernizing film studios in Uzbekistan to our brand-new high-technology industrial park and convention centre—the Future Tek 2000—coming soon to the Stolovan capital, PravaInvest has left no market uncornered.”

  How about those Uzbek film studios! And the scale model of the tree-lined FutureTek campus, that postindustrial Taj Mahal!

  “A Forward-Looking Mentality. Have we mentioned the Future Tek 2000? Of course! The vanguard of technology is the only place to be whether you’re running a modern high-rise hotel in the Albanian capital of Tirana, a vocational school for the Yupik Eskimo in Siberia, or a small but consequential literary magazine in Prava. And PravaInvest’s ideals are as solid as our reputation for prudent investment. We’re committed to building lasting peace in the Balkans, cleaning up the Danube, and issuing the most exceptional dividends to our investors. We have our cake and eat it too, every single day.”

  Before a Bosnian was shown eating his torte, and after the Yupik Eskimo waved to the camera with their T-squares and protractors, Cohen and Alexandra were caught leaning over Cagliostro proofs engaged in heated (and, thankfully, silent) discussion. The camera made Cohen seem fat and thirtyish, while Alexandra, with her round face and dark curving lashes, looked positively Persian. A great cheer greeted the literary pair, a cheer that extended way beyond the Crowd (gorging itself on caviar in the first row) to all the youthful precincts in the auditorium. Even Morgan—her relationship with Vladimir still choppy and unsettled—looking tonight like a bored young embassy wife stuck in some Kinshasa or Phnom Penh, had to pick up her hands and clap at the image of her dear friend Alexandra. Yes, Cagliostro had been a stroke of genius, a marketing tool to be studied at Wharton. Too bad the damn thing still didn’t exist.

  “So what are you waiting for? Shares of PravaInvest stock have been circulating on the Tanzanian stock exchange at approximately U.S. $920 per share. We are now pleased to offer them for nearly half the price in an effort to ‘give something back’ to those who have enabled our meteoric rise: the residents of the former Warsaw Pact. For information on our current schedule of dividends please call Vladimir Girshkin, Executive Vice President, at our Prava headquarters: tel. (0789) 02 36 21 59 / fax 02 36 21 60. Or call his associate František Kral at (0789) 02 33 65 12. Both are fluent in English and more than happy to assist you.

  “Now it’s your turn to GIVE SOMETHING BACK! PravaInvest, s.r.o.”

  MEANWHILE, courtesy of the poet Fish, a package arrived from Lyon containing twenty vials of liquid horse tranquilizer, cooking instructions for transformation of said into snorting powder, and the most God-awful poetry to appear in an Alaskan literary journal. Vladimir took this loot to Marusya and explained the situation to her. She shook her balding head as if to say, “Nu, what’s in it for me?” Vladimir knew it wasn’t a matter of her antidrug principles. She tended to the opium garden with loving grace and surely skimmed off the top both in the garden and at her little concession stand. Hell, by nine in the morning when Vladimir went off for his jog with Kostya (Vladimir looking as cheerless as a conscript in a labor brigade), old Marusya was already tweaked enough to fumble on the obligatory dobry den’.

  So a hard-currency compromise was reached, and Marusya, limping ahead like a blighted hobbit, took him down to the main building’s basement where several gas-fired stoves were lined in a row awaiting some devious purpose. They didn’t have to wait long. Inside their cracked ceramic interiors, the liquid horse tranquilizer was cooked at a tremendous temperature in an assortment of pots and pans. Once cooked, Marusya would flip the resulting wafer as gingerly as if it were a blin and set it to cool on a metal tray. Afterward, she’d go at it with a mallet until the wafer was reduced to a small mountain of snortable powder, which she would wrap into a little cellophane log and set out for Vladimir’s inspection. This she did while beaming with the pride of workmanship, her mouthful of gold teeth gleaming in the basement’s dusty air.

  Vladimir assembled a nice stack of the little tranquilizer logs, although for the time being he didn’t know where to push them, what the right segue would be for offering up the fifteen-minute lobotomies to the Crowd and beyond. For that he would need his club, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

  MC PAAVO ARRIVED a few days hence on a little turbo-prop bearing the Finnish cross on its tail. He couldn’t shut up even before he got off the plane. They heard his deep voice knocking about in the cabin while they waited on the tarmac: “MC Paavo in de haus! In de pan-European ’hood! Got de Helsinki beat, y’all can’t fuck wif!”

  He was no older
than František, only he hadn’t kept well at all: wrinkles carved deep to the order of the San Andreas Fault, a hairline in recession and not in the graceful arc of male-pattern baldness, but instead a jagged line, like soldiers beating a piecemeal retreat from the front. To maintain his youth he jabbered like a fifteen-year-old on crack, and sniffed at his armpits as if a great youthful elixir flowed from each. The Finn, only marginally tall, hugged František, ruffled his hair, and called him “My boy-ee,” while the former socialist globetrotter, unfamiliar with hip-hop expressions but never one to be left out, responded with “My girl,” and here the hilarity crested for a bit.

  They took Paavo to the Kasino, where he dropped to his knees and crawled about a bit, citing amps and wattage and other technical specifications lost on our Soviet-bloc friends. “Great,” he said. “Knock out the two floors above and we ready to start pumpin.’ ”

  This request actually gave Gusev’s men something constructive to do: They went after the glue-and-cardboard floors with electric staple-guns and machetes, with axes and grenade launchers, with protective goggles and a Russian’s unshakable hope that from destruction the Lord will create anew. By the time they were finished, not only the two floors above the Kasino were removed, but a skylight was knocked through the sixth floor as well. Vladimir, a resident of the Kasino building, found himself temporarily homeless, forced either to squat in Morgan’s pad or take a room at the Intercontinental. Despite his problems with Morgan, he resigned himself to the former.

  The Russians’ hopes of providence, however, were not entirely unfounded. The Lord didn’t provide, but Harold Green did. The Canadian’s funds paid for a gorgeous, loopy discorama flanked by enough theme lounges to keep the saddest drunk happy. It was christened, as we already know, the Metamorphosis Lounge.