“Aaa . . .” the Groundhog said, losing the thread of his tale for a moment. “Yes. Lovely story. So I run up to House of Girl and Lena is already finish with her bad business, and she is washing up, but I don’t care, I open door to her room, and she is standing there, wiping with towel, and I have never seen this . . . Oh! Skin white! Hair red! Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi! Oh, my God! Russian beauty! I am getting down on my foot and I give her flower and Mozart ball, and, and . . .” He looked to Lena and then to Vladimir and then back to his beloved. He put his hand to his heart. “And . . .” he whispered.
“And so four months later, we are here with you at table,” the practical Lena summed up for him. “So tell me,” she asked the near-catatonic Morgan, “how did you meet Vladimir?”
“At a poetry reading,” Morgan mumbled, looking around the room, perhaps trying to find a fellow law-abiding American to connect with. No such luck. Every second customer was a horny Stolovan biznesman in a double-breasted purple jacket, a pleasant twenty-year-old companion on his arm. “Vladimir is a very good poet,” Morgan said.
“Yes, he is maybe poet laureate,” Lena laughed.
“He was reading a poem about his mother at the Joy,” Morgan said, trying to take the high road. “It was about how he went to Chinatown with his mother. It was very beautiful, I thought.”
“Russian man loves his mother.” The Groundhog sighed. “My mama died in Odessa, year 1957, from death of kidney. I was only little child then. She was hard woman, but how I wish I could kiss her good night one more time. All I have in entire world now is papa in New York, he is sailor-invalid. This is how I hear of Vladimir. He help my papa get U.S. citizenship by making crime against American immigration service. So he is also criminal laureate, my Volodechka!”
Morgan put down her Road 66 garden burger and glared at Vladimir, a bead of ketchup on her upper lip. “Yes, what can I say?” Vladimir said, shyly addressing the Groundhog’s charge of criminality. “There was some intrigue with the INS. I helped out as best I could. Oh, what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
“Groundhog one day tell me funny story,” Lenochka said, “about how Vladimir take money from rich Canadian and then he sells horse drug to Americans in club. You have very clever boyfriend, Morgan.”
Morgan painfully nudged Vladimir’s shoulder. “He’s an investor,” she said. “He invested Harold Green’s money into a club. And he’s not dealing drugs. It’s that Finn. MC Paavo.”
“Take, invest, what’s the difference?” Vladimir said. But he made a note to ease up on the jolly candor, lest it imperil his pyramid scheme. Morgan, after all, remained friends with Alexandra and, by extension, the Crowd, PravaInvest’s trendy cornerstone. Still, when he leaned over to wipe the ketchup off Morgan’s shaky upper lip he also managed to whisper into her ear, “Morgan to the Gulag!” and “Death to the Foot, honey!”
He just wanted to let her know where things stood.
THE FIGHTING STARTED in the car, right after Vladimir’s final wave to Lena and the Groundhog. Jan was cruising past the darkened townhouses of the Brookline Gardens (some homes still wearing their holiday wreaths and “Merry Xmas” signs), trying to find Westmoreland Street, the smooth, paved artery which connected the Groundhog’s suburban fairy tale with Prava’s pot-holed municipal highway, its dying factories, and crumbling panelaks. Meanwhile Morgan was loudly exploring her feelings.
“He met his girlfriend at a whorehouse!” she was shouting as if that had been the most egregious news of the evening. “He’s a fucking gangster . . . And you! And YOU!”
“Quite a surprise, eh?” Vladimir said in an ambiguously low tone. “It’s terrible when people aren’t honest with one another.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, Morgie . . . Let’s see. Tomaš. Death to the Foot. What do you think?”
“What does Tomaš have to do with anything?” she shouted.
“You’re fucking him.”
“Who?”
“Tomaš.”
“Oh, please.”
“Then what?”
“We’re working on a project together.” She pulled a used soda can out of a cup holder and began crushing it with all of her considerable strength.
“A project? Do tell me more . . .”
“It’s a political project, Vladi. You wouldn’t be interested. You’re more into stealing money from poor Canadians and getting your friends hooked on that horse shit.”
“Mmm, a political project. How fascinating. Maybe I can help. I’m a pretty civic-minded guy, you know. I’ve read Lenin’s State and Revolution at least twice in college.”
“You’re a beautiful man, Vladimir,” Morgan said.
“Oh, fuck you, Morgie. What’s the project? You’re going to blow up the Foot or something? There’s dynamite in that sealed room of yours? You and Tommy are going to light the fuse during the May Day parade? Dead babushkas as far as the eye can see . . .”
Morgan threw her empty soda can at Vladimir where it momentarily stung his left ear and rattled off one tinted window. “Boy and girl, please be good to expensive car,” Jan remarked from the driver’s seat.
“What the hell was that?” Vladimir hissed at her. “What the hell did you do that for?” Morgan said nothing. She stared out her window at the pyrotechnics of an overturned oil truck in the middle of the highway, firemen in Day-Glo jackets waving Jan onto a side road. “Are you fucking crazy?” Vladimir said.
Morgan remained silent and this silence made Vladimir both enraged and a little giddy. “Oooh, was I right?” he taunted, scratching his offended ear. “You gonna blow up the Foot, eh? Little Morgan and her platonic buddy Tommy gonna blow up the Foot!”
“No,” Morgan said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No,” she said once more. But the “No” repeated twice would be her undoing.
No, Vladimir thought. What the hell did that mean? He took her first “No” at face value, then he added the second “No” and then he threw in her long silence plus the brutal attack with the soda can. What was he thinking now? But it couldn’t be. Death to the Foot? No. Yes? No. But how?
“Morgan,” Vladimir said, suddenly serious. “You’re not going to blow up the Foot, are you? I mean that would just be . . .”
“No,” Morgan said for the third time, still looking away. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Jesus Christ, Morgan,” Vladimir finally said. Sealed room. Crazed babushkas. Semtex? That one clichéd word announced itself uninvited. “Semtex?” Vladimir said.
“No,” Morgan whispered, still looking outside her window at the dregs of urban Prava, an abandoned railroad station, a television tower lying on its side, a socialist-era swimming pool filled with dismantled tractors.
“Morgan!” Vladimir said, reaching over to touch her but deciding otherwise.
“You don’t understand anything,” Morgan said. She covered her face with her hands. “You’re just a little boy,” she said. “An oppressed immigrant. That’s what Alexandra calls you. What the hell do you know about oppression? What do you know about anything?”
“Oh, Morgan,” Vladimir said. He couldn’t help but feel a swift and ambiguous sadness. “Oh, Morgan,” he repeated. “What have you gotten yourself into, honey?”
“Give me your mobile . . .” Morgan said.
“What?”
“You want to meet him . . . Is that what you want? Mr. Vladimir Girshkin. Criminal laureate. I can’t believe what you just put me through at that dinner. That poor stupid woman. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ I can’t believe any of you people . . . Give me your phone!”
AND SO IT was done. A connection was made. Two hours later. Half past midnight. Back at Morgan’s panelak. He came with a partner. “This is my friend,” Tomaš announced. “We call him Alpha.”
Waiting for the Stolovans, Vladimir had helped himself to several vodka shots and was on the verge of becoming boisterous. “Hey there, Alpha!” he shouted. “Are you part of
a team? Like Team Alpha? Oooh . . . I love you guys already.”
“I have no money,” Tomaš said to Morgan. “Taxi is waiting outside. Could you . . .” Without a word Morgan ran off to pay the taxi.
“How about I fix you a drink, Tommy,” Vladimir said. “Alpha, what are you having?” Vladimir was recumbent in his usual place on the sofa, while the two Stolovans remained standing across the room, their postures hunched and guarded as if Vladimir was a wild ocelot that might attack at any moment.
“I’m not a drinker,” Tomaš said, and by Vladimir’s estimation he wasn’t much of anything. A slight man with pink, scaly patches of psoriasis on his cheeks and a thicket of receded yellow hair that formed a natural mohawk, he was dressed in an old trench coat with thick glasses that verged on safety goggles, and a bright shirt, possibly of Chinese origin, which peeked out of his coat. Alpha looked rather similar (both had their hands jammed into their coat pockets and were blinking a lot), except Tomaš’s sidekick was entirely missing a set of eyebrows (industrial accident?) and had a telephone cord tied around the waist of his trench coat. Without knowing it, the two gentlemen were actually on the cutting edge of fashion, wearing what in New York would soon be called “Immigrant Chic.”
“I thought, or rather, I am thinking now,” Tomaš declared, “that I am to blame for problems here. I should have come to you forthly. Yes? Forthly? Excuse my English. In affairs between man and woman, honesty must be the lodestar by which we navigate.”
“Yeah,” Vladimir said as he loudly sucked on a lemon. “Lodestar. You said it, Tommy.” Now why was he being so mean to this unfortunate man? It wasn’t exactly jealousy over Tomaš’s affair with Morgan. It was . . . What? A sense of overfamiliarity? Yes, in some way, this pockmarked Tomaš was like a long-lost landsman. What a thought: for all his posturing, very little separated Vladimir from his ex-Soviet brethren, from the childhoods spent lusting after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, drinking endless cups of homemade yogurt for dubious health reasons, and dreaming of someday bombing the Americans into submission.
Tomaš, for his part, ignored Vladimir’s remarks. “I was privileged,” he said, “to be Morgan’s companion from 12 May 1992 through 6 September 1993. On the morning of 7 September, she ended our love relationship and we have been since then steadfast friends.” He looked imploringly toward Vladimir’s vodka bottle and then down to the pair of broken moccasins on his feet. As soon as he spoke with those awkward gooey lips, his red ears flapping along to the sound of each consonant, Vladimir knew it was true: Tomaš was no longer in the running. Poor guy. There was something indubitably unsettling about having to confess one’s failure as a lover. Then again, Vladimir tried to picture the little Stolovan with the big flattened nose and ruined skin on top of Morgan and immediately felt all the more sorry for her. What the hell was she thinking? Did she have some sort of a fetish for Eastern European sad sacks? And if so, where did that leave Vladimir?
“What do you think of all this, Alpha?” Vladimir asked Tomaš’s partner.
“I have never known love,” Alpha confessed, tugging at his telephone cord. “Women do not think of me as this type of guy. Yes, I am alone, but I do many things to keep busy . . . I am very busy with myself.”
“Wow,” Vladimir said sadly. Being with these two made him feel lost and disoriented, as if his traditional outsider’s place in the social hierarchy had been completely usurped. “Wow,” he repeated, trying to imbue the word with a kind of empty Californian inflection.
Morgan came back into the flat, averted her eyes from her lover and ex-lover, and busied herself with taking off her snow-covered galoshes. “You know, I’m actually starting to like your friends,” Vladimir told her. “But I still can’t believe that you and Tomaš here once shared a bed . . . He’s not exactly . . .”
“To you I am so-called drip,” Tomaš said plainly. “Or, perhaps, nerd or bore.” He bowed a little as if to show how comfortable he was with his identity.
“Tomaš is a wonderful man,” Morgan said, taking off her sweater, dressed now only in the famous silk blouse. The three Eastern Europeans paused to examine her silhouette. “There’s a lot you could learn from him,” Morgan continued. “He’s not an egoist like you, Vladimir. And he’s not even a criminal. How about that!”
“Maybe I’m missing something here,” Vladimir said, “but I thought that blowing up a hundred-meter statue in the middle of the Old Town constituted a crime.”
“He knows about the Foot destruction!” Tomaš shouted. “Morgan, how you can tell? We are bound by blood!” Alpha, too, looked shaken by this news. He pressed his hand to his breast pocket, where a Stolovan–English dictionary and some computer diskettes likely resided.
“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Morgan said in a tone so blasé it was scary. “I’m privy to some info on his PyramidInvest—”
He’ll keep his mouth shut? . . . Privy? . . . Oh, this Morgan was hardboiled! “Tell me,” Vladimir asked her, “wasn’t it a little dangerous for us to live here in this shoddy panelak, the very earth shaking from the tremors of our fucking [slight look of discomfort on Tomaš’s part] while hundreds of kilograms of Semtex were stowed in the next room?”
“Not Semtex,” Alpha said. “We prefer C4, American explosive. We trust only American. Nothing good left in our world.”
“You fellows are ready for the Young Republicans, I do believe,” said Vladimir.
“C4 is very good explosive to control,” Alpha went on, “and also strong with TNT equivalency of one hundred eighteen percent. Placed at, mmm, such and such interval within Foot and activated by external source, I think result will be that the top of Foot implodes . . . What I am meaning is that top of Foot will collapse inside hollow of Foot itself. Most important caveat: Nobody get hurt.”
“I take it you’re the munitions expert,” Vladimir said.
“We are both students at the Prava State University,” Tomaš explained. “I am studying at faculty of philology and Alpha studying at faculty of applied science. So I am working out theory for destruction of Foot and Alpha designing explosion materials.”
“Exactly,” Alpha said, fluttering his hands inside his coat pockets like an anxious bird. “How do you say? He is the intellectual and I am the materialist.”
“I don’t get it,” Vladimir said. “Why don’t you two just get jobs at one of those nice German multinationals on Stanislaus Square? I’m sure you’re both quite handy with computers and your English is primo. If you learn to speak a little office Deutsche and maybe pick up some new tennis shoes at the Kmart I’m sure you’ll be raking in the crowns.”
“We are not averse to working for this company you mention,” Tomaš said, as if Vladimir had just offered them a job. “We would like to live nice life and make babies too, but before we can make this future we must take care of the sad history.” He looked meaningfully to Morgan.
“I see,” Vladimir said. “And by blowing up the Foot, you’re . . . taking care of that . . . Ah, that pesky history!”
“You don’t know how their families have suffered!” Morgan suddenly said. She was staring at Vladimir with those dead gray eyes, her political eyes, or perhaps the eyes of some greater unhappiness.
“Oh, yes,” Vladimir said. “How right you are, Morgan. What do I know? You see, I was actually brought up by Rob and Wanda Henckel of San Diego, California. Yes, a healthy childhood spent watching the Pacific surf crash at my big suntanned feet, a four-year stint at UCSD, and now here I am, Bobby Henckel, senior brand manager of Flo-Ease Laxatives for the Eastern region . . . That’s right, Morgan, please do tell me more about what it’s like to be from this part of the world. It all sounds so damn exotic and, jeez, kinda sad, too . . . Stalinism, you say? Repression, eh? Show trials, huh? Wowsers.”
“It’s different for you,” Morgan muttered, glancing at Tomaš for support. “You’re from the Soviet Union. Your people invaded this country in 1969.”
“It’s different for me,” Vladimir repeated. “M
y people. Is that what you’ve been telling her, Tom? Is this the world according to Alpha? Ah, my dear stupid fellows . . . Do you know how similar we are, the three of us? Why, we’re the same proto-Soviet model. We’re like human Ladas or Trabants. We’re ruined, folks. You can blow up all the Feet in the world, you can rant and rave through the Old Town Square, you can emigrate to sunny Brisbane or Chicago’s Gold Coast, but if you grew up under that system, that precious gray planet of our fathers and forefathers, you’re marked for life. There’s no way out, Tommy. Go ahead, make all the money you want, hatch those American babies, but thirty years later you’ll still look back at your youth and wonder: What happened? How could people have lived like that? How could they have taken advantage of the weakest among them? How could they have spoken to each other with such viciousness and spite, much as I’m speaking to you right now? And what’s that strange coal-like crust on my skin that clogs the shower drain every morning? Was I part of an experiment? Do I have a Soviet turbine instead of a heart? And why do my parents still quake every time they approach passport control? And who the hell are these children of mine in those Walt Disney World parkas running around making noise like there’s nothing to stop them?”
He got up and walked over to Morgan, who shifted her gaze away from him. “And you,” he said, recovering some of the anger he had lost during his speech to the Warsaw Pact duo. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your battle, Morgan. You have no enemies here, not even me. That pretty Cleveland suburb, that’s for you, honey. This is our land. We can’t help you here. Not any of us.”
He finished his drink, felt the surge of its lemony warmth, and, quite unsure of what he was doing, walked out of the apartment.
WIRY GUSTS OF wind were prodding frozen Vladimir forward, jabbing at his back with sharp-nailed fingers. He was wearing nothing more than a sweater, a woolen pair of winter janitor pants, and some long underwear. And yet the deadly circumstances of being caught coatless on an icy January night did not bother Vladimir. A steamy river of alcohol ran through him.
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook Page 36