The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  A NIGHT TO remember at the Metamorphosis Lounge? Good luck. You’ll need three omniscient narrators to cobble together half a narrative. But, what the hell, let’s try to maintain some dignity and recall what happened on night X, hour Y, in the main room, the Kafka Insecuritorium.

  On that particular night the dance floor is hogged by the new arriviste crowd, Prava’s temporary “it” thing by dint of their impressive numbers and some sort of media-publishing party connection they share in New York–Los Angeles, with a stopover in London–Berlin. There they are: white people in chamois lounge suits and bug-eyed sunglasses, falling apart on the dance floor to the thumpa-thumpa of MC Paavo and the whirl of his techno fog. One gets up, another falls down. One takes off his shirt to reveal himself flabby and old, just as his girlfriend, sweaty and young, is waking up and putting on her bra: a miscommunication. Now they’re crying and hugging. Soon enough they’re waving to the captain’s table, shouting, “Vladimir! Alexandra!”

  At the captain’s table the wave is returned. “Sure, I wouldn’t want to risk sending any of our men to Sarajevo right now,” Harold Green is shouting to Vladimir over MC Paavo’s twenty beats per second. Harry’s webbed face is further creased with concern as he is likely thinking about PravaInvest’s “bright and eager young specialists” dodging enemy fire behind the rump of a U.N. armored personnel carrier.

  “Have another drink, Harold. We’ll talk Bosnia tomorrow.”

  Speaking of Bosnia, there’s Nadija. She’s from Mostar or thereabouts, her face as chiseled as a constructivist bust of Tito, her body as long and purposeful as that of a socialist-worker heroine, the mother of a nation. There she goes, leading by the chin a small, bearded liberal-arts specimen with an eager hamster expression, a pouf of red hair, and a tragic limp. She’s not taking him to the Ministry of Love, though. Its twenty bunkbeds, truncheons, and prized Israeli water cannon are for a different, later part of the night. No, first, the pale gentleman must do away with modern malaise: It’s time for a visit to Grandmother Marusya’s Infirmary, where there’s borscht for colds, opium for headaches, and horse tranquilizer for overactive imaginations.

  BACK AT THE insecuritorium . . . At the Captain’s Table, is that . . . Could it be? Alexandra and Cohen necking? Yes! Marcus the rugby runt, Alexandra’s ex-boyfriend, is gone—Daddy stopped wiring him funds, so it’s “back to naffing England for me, mate.” A closer look reveals Alexandra looking great tonight, formal in a spaghetti-strap dress and with her hair up. But the pouches under her eyes have the texture of leather, and then there’s the red swelling around her nostrils, a swelling from which sprout dark little hairs as thick and straight as dry grass. Someone’s been grazing at the horse stables one time too many.

  But just look at her new beau. Cohen’s taken a beautiful old Armani sports jacket and roughed it up so that it is no longer a tool of oppression. He’s trimmed his beard and hair so that he looks five years older, with a doctoral thesis in the hopper. And now he’s wrapped his big arms around Alexandra and is telling her to calm down, that it’s all right, that she can drop her nightly dosage in the toilet, they’ll go to Crete next week to dance among the sheep, to drink mineral water and talk about themselves until it all makes sense. It’s hard to hear him above the bird squawks and jackhammer noises slipping off of MC Paavo’s turntable, but one can be sure that Cohen’s telling her that he loves her and he always has.

  AND WHAT ABOUT Vladimir? At the other end of the Captain’s Table, there he is, watching Cohen neck with Alexandra, as Harold Green begins his latest series of mind-bending lectures on his Soros Foundation in the sky. Vladimir takes a long look around the Metamorphosis, this terra incognito that he and František and MC Paavo have wrought in the biblical span of forty days. It’s a late hour, much too late for a Monday—and it’s usually around this time that Vladimir starts to ask himself the questions that cannot be answered with a healthy application of horse tranquilizer or a sip of one of the U.S.$5.50 Belgian lagers that have made the Metamorphosis so hip and solvent.

  For instance: What would Mother think of his clever new venture? Would she be proud? Would she consider his little pyramid scheme a cheap alternative to an MBA? Has he inadvertently created something that will please her? Come to think of it, is there really any difference between Mother’s corporate colossus and his scrappy PravaInvest? And was it true what they said, that childhood was destiny? That there was no escape?

  Finally, the one question Vladimir Girshkin has been trying to avoid all night by waxing nostalgic about Mother and fate and greed and his own strange, inglorious path from victim to victimizer:

  Where was Morgan?

  32. DEATH TO

  THE FOOT

  MORGAN WAS HOME.

  Morgan was home a lot. Or she was teaching. Or she was wrestling with crazy old ladies. Or she was fucking Tomaš. It was hard to say. They didn’t talk much, Morgan and Vladimir. Their relationship had entered the stable, mutually dissatisfying stage of an old marriage. They were a bit like the Girshkins, each devoted more to their own tiny personal joys and vast private terrors than to each other.

  How could they live like this?

  Well, as we have seen, Vladimir, for the past month or so, has been working overtime to make PravaInvest the pyramid scheme to end all pyramid schemes forever. As for Morgan, she asked few questions about Vladimir’s flourishing bizness and she never made it out to the Metamorphosis either, claiming she wasn’t one for ear-popping Drum N’ Bass, and that she found Vladimir’s new pal František “a little creepy” and the whole horse tranquilizer scene deeply disturbing.

  Fair enough. It was.

  Now as for their intimacy, it continued. Prava is a fairly warm place in the fall and spring, but by mid-December the temperature inexplicably drops to Siberian levels, and members of the populace like to “get down” with one another—people of advanced age making out fearlessly in the metro, teenagers rubbing their butts together in the Old Town Square, and, in the freezing panelaks, to be without a partner blowing warm, beery breath up your crevices could mean a certain death.

  So they pressed against each other. As they were watching the news, Morgan’s nose would sometimes be parked in between Vladimir’s nose and cheek, a particularly tropical place as Vladimir’s feverish body averaged 99.4 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. And sometimes, on a cold morning, he would warm his hands between her thighs, which, unlike her cold cheeks and icicle ears, seemed to retain most of her warmth; by Vladimir’s calculations, a polar winter could pass quite comfortably with his various extremities lodged between her thighs.

  As for sweet nothings, the words “I love you” were said exactly twice in the course of five weeks. Once, inadvertently, by Vladimir after he had climaxed into her hand and she was casually wiping herself with a sandpapery Stolovan tissue, her expression peaceful and generous (remember the tent!). And once by Morgan after she had unwrapped Vladimir’s thoughtful Christmas present, Vaclav Havel’s collected works in Stolovan, with an introduction by Borik Hrad, the so-called Stolovan Lou Reed. “I guess it’s important to believe in something,” Vladimir had written on the title page, although his own shaky handwriting left him unconvinced of that sentiment.

  So, as implied, along with jealousy, there was coitus. Why? Because for Vladimir, the possibility that Morgan might have been sharing her afternoons with Tomaš, while maddening in its own right, only increased his vigor in bed. Much as with Challah during her dungeon days, he was inspired by the idea that the woman he wanted also wanted to be with others. It’s a simple equation that exists between many lovers: He could not have her and so he desired her.

  But, apart from his intimate needs, his anger at Morgan continued to grow apace, the lust and hurt sometimes working at cross-purposes and sometimes, as when he had to perform in bed, working in tandem. He felt powerless. What could he do to convince her that she loved him and not Tomaš, that she must renounce her murky secret life in favor of normalcy, affection, and arousal, that
one must always be on the right side of history, eating roast boar at the Wine Archive instead of freezing to death in the Gulag?

  But she wouldn’t understand him, stubborn Midwestern girl. So he worked on two fronts: To alleviate his lust, he crawled into bed beside her, but to alleviate his hurt, the best he could hope for was revenge. The best he could hope for was a certain double date. Hence when the Groundhog called to announce that Road 66, the restaurant in the Food Court of his townhouse estate, was ready to dish out hot curly fries in exchange for American dollars, Vladimir happily accepted on Morgan’s behalf.

  THERE WAS ONE terribly cute thing about Morgan: Despite being nominally upper-middle-class, she owned only one formal outfit, the tight silk blouse she wore on her first date with Vladimir. Everything else in her closet was rugged and “built to last,” as they say in the States, for unlike Vladimir, she did not come to Prava to be the belle of the ball.

  When they pulled up to Road 66, Morgan nervously tugged on the sleeves of this important blouse to make sure it covered her body just right. She smudged at her lipstick for the third time and scratched a front tooth for no apparent reason. “Shouldn’t it be called Route 66?” Morgan asked, upon scrutinizing the flashing restaurant sign. Vladimir winked mysteriously and kissed her cheek.

  “Hey! Stop it,” she said. “I’ve got blush on. Look what you did.” She reached for her purse once again and Vladimir had to fight those unproductive feelings of tenderness as she blew her nose and repowdered her cheeks.

  “Well if you, Morgan Jenson . . . ever plan . . . to motor West,” Vladimir sang as they walked arm-in-arm past the ten-acre gravel ditch that would soon become an American-style mall and toward the restaurant’s giant neon pimiento, “just take my way . . . that’s the highway . . . that’s the best.”

  “How can you be singing?” Morgan said, once more blotting at her lips with a napkin. “I mean, we’re having dinner with your boss. Aren’t you, like, scared?”

  “Get your kicks,” Vladimir crooned as he pulled at the door handles shaped like two plastic rattlesnakes, “on Route . . . Sixty-six.”

  An awesome vista of cheap mahogany and American-themed tackiness greeted them, as the restaurant, just like the song, wound its way “from Chicago to L.A . . . . more than two thousand miles all the way,” with tables marked St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Flagstaff, “don’t forget Winona . . . Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . .”

  The Groundhog and his girl were holed up in Flagstaff tonight. “Volodya, I got the cactus!” the Groundhog shouted to Vladimir across the vast restaurant. The Flagstaff table was indeed graced with a mighty glowing artificial cactus, much more imposing than, say, the ridiculous six-foot Gateway Arch of St. Louis or the deserted Geronimo Trading Post several tables into Arizona.

  “They tell me there is always a waiting list for cactus,” the Groundhog soberly informed them in English while the introductions were made and the chocolate milkshakes ordered. As part of his Western training, Vladimir had forced the Hog to buy ten black turtlenecks and ten pairs of slacks from a specialized slacks company in Maine, and tonight the Groundhog looked like he was headed for a liberal-minded Upper West Side Thanksgiving dinner. As for the love of his life, Lenochka, well, an entire novel could be written about her, so there is only time to discuss her hair.

  Let us say this: in the early 1990s, the Women of the West were favoring short cuts, pageboys, and curt little bobs, but Lena continued to celebrate her hair in the old Russian style. She refused to commit to wearing it either up or down, so she did both: A great mane crowned her shoulders, while an additional fifteen pounds of violent strawberry hair was pulled up by an enormous white bow. Beneath the cascades of hair there was a mil’en’koe russkoe lichiko, a pretty little Russian face with raised Mongolian cheekbones and a pointy nose. She wore exactly the same turtleneck-and-slacks outfit as the Groundhog, giving them the look of honeymooning tourists.

  The Groundhog kissed Morgan’s hand. “Very much pleasure,” he said. “Tonight Lenochka and I practicing English, so please to correct Groundhog expression. I think in English I am called, eh, ‘Groundhog,’ but dictionary also saying ‘Marmot.’ Do you have such little animal in your country? Vladimir say everyone must speak English now!”

  “I wish I remembered my Russian from college,” Morgan said and smiled in encouragement, as if Russian was still a global language worth learning. “I know a little Stolovan, but it’s just not the same.”

  They were seated, the couples facing each other, and the Groundhog made himself appear manly by ordering food for everybody—garden burgers for the ladies and ostrich burgers for the men. “Also, three plates of curly fries with hot sauce,” he demanded of the waitress. “I love such shit.” He smiled broadly to his companions.

  “So . . .” Vladimir said, unsure of how to get this little Revenge Dinner started.

  “Yes . . .” Groundhog said and nodded at Vladimir. “So.”

  “So . . .” Morgan smiled at Lena and the Groundhog. She was already cracking her knuckles under the table, poor thing. “So how did you two meet?” she asked. A great double-date question.

  “Mmm . . .” The Groundhog smiled nostalgically. “Eh, is big story,” he said in his broken but strangely adorable English. “I tell it? Yes? Good? Okay. Big story. So one day Groundhog is in Dnepropetrovsk, so he is in Eastern Ukraina, and many people are doing to him bad thing and so Groundhog is doing to them also very bad thing and, eh, time goes tick tick tick tick on the clock, and after two revolvement of clock needle, after forty-eight hours passing away, it is Groundhog who is alive and it is enemies of him who are . . . eh . . . dead.”

  “Wait,” said Morgan. “Do you mean . . .”

  “Metaphorically speaking, they’re dead,” Vladimir interjected somewhat half-heartedly.

  “So,” the Groundhog continued, “is finished bad business, but Groundhog still very lonely and very sad . . .”

  “Ai, my Tolya . . .” said Lena, adjusting her bow with one hand and directing her milkshake straw with the other. “You see, Morgan, he has Russian soul . . . Do you understand what it is, Russian soul?”

  “I’ve heard about it from Vladimir,” Morgan said. “It’s like . . .”

  “It’s very nice,” Vladimir said. He gestured for the Hog to continue, knowing full well where his employer’s little tale was headed. Very nice, indeed.

  “So, okay, lonely Groundhog has nobody in Dnepropetrovsk. His cousin kill himself last year and Dyadya Lyosha, distant relative, he die from drink. So is finish! No family, no friend, nothing.”

  “Bedny moi surok,” said Lena. “How do you say in English . . . My poor Groundhog . . .”

  “You know I can totally understand you,” Morgan said. “It’s so difficult to go to a strange town, even in America. I went to Dayton once, I was in a basketball camp . . .”

  “Anyway,” the Hog interrupted. “So Groundhog is alone in Dnepropetrovsk and his bed is very cold and there is no girl for him to lie down on, and so he is going to, how do you say, publichni dom? The House of the Public? You know what this is . . . ?”

  Lena dipped a lone curly fry into a pool of hot sauce. “House of Girl, maybe?” she suggested.

  “Yes, yes. Exactly such house. And so he is sitting down and Madame is coming in and she is introducing Hog to such and such girl and Groundhog is, like, Tphoo! Tphoo! He is spitting on the ground, because is so ugly. One, maybe, has face black like Gypsy, another having big nose, another speaking some Pygmy language, not Russian . . . And Groundhog is looking for, you know, special girl.”

  “He is very cultured,” Lena said, patting his enormous hand. “Tolya, you should declaim for Morgan famous poema by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, called, eh . . .” she looked imploringly at Vladimir.

  “The Bronze Horseman?” Vladimir guessed.

  “Yes, correct. Bronze Horseman. Very beautiful poema. Everybody knows such poema. It is about famous statue of man on horse.”

  “Lena! Pleas
e! I am telling interesting story!” the Hog shouted. “So Groundhog is leaving House of Girl, but then he hearing beautiful sound from room of love. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ It is like wonderful Slavic angel. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ Voice tender like young girl. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ He is asking Madame: ‘Tell me, who is making Okh?’ Madame is saying, oh, is our Lenochka making such Okh, but she is only for valuta, for, you know, hard currency. Groundhog is, like: ‘I have dollar, Deutsche mark, Finnish markka, nu, what you want?’ So Madame is saying, okay, sit down on divan for twenty minutes and soon you will have this Lena.’ So Groundhog sitting and sitting and he is hearing this beautiful ‘okh’ sound like bird singing to another bird, and he is suddenly becoming, eh . . . How do you say, Vladimir?”

  He whispered a word in Russian. “Well . . .” Vladimir looked to Morgan. Her face was ashen and she was nervously twisting a drinking straw around one white finger as if applying a tourniquet. “Engorged, I guess,” Vladimir translated, softening the hard meaning a bit.

  “Yes! Groundhog is becoming engorge in the foyer and he shouting, ‘Lena! Lena! Lenochka!’ And in the room of love she is shouting ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ And it is like duet. It is like Bolshoi opera. Shit! And so he get up, still gorged, and he run down quickly to local laryok and he is buying beautiful flowers . . .”

  “Yes!” Lena said. “He is buying scarlet roses, just like in my favorite song, ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’ by Alla Pugacheva. So I know God is watching us!”

  “And also I am buying expensive chocolate candy in shape of ball!”

  “Yes,” Lena said. “I remember, from Austria, with each ball having picture of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I once study music in Kiev conservatory.”

  They looked at each other and briefly smiled, mumbling a few words in Russian. Vladimir thought he heard the endearment “las-tochka ti moya,” which meant roughly “you’re my little swallow.” The Hog quickly smooched Lena and then looked back at his tablemates, a little embarrassed.