The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  He tumbled ahead.

  Morgan’s building was an isolated structure, but further in the distance, beyond a ravine that concealed an old tire factory, there decamped a regiment of condemned panelaks, which, with their rows of broken windows, looked like short, toothless soldiers guarding some long-sacked fortress. Now, there was a sight! The five-story concrete tombstones, perched on a little hill, were slouching toward the ravine, one building having shed its facade entirely so that the tiny rectangles of its rooms were exposed to the elements like a giant rat maze. Chemical flames emanating from the tire factory in the gorge below lit up the building’s ghostly recesses, reminding Vladimir of grinning holiday jack-o’-lanterns.

  And once again, the undeniable feeling that he was home, that these ingredients—panelak, tire factory, the corrupted flames of industry—were, for Vladimir, primordial, essential, revelatory. The truth was that he would have ended up here anyway, whether or not Jordi had taken out his member in that Floridian hotel room; the truth was that for the last twenty years, from Soviet kindergarten to the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, all the signs had been pointing to this ravine, these panelaks, this sinking green moon.

  He heard his name being called. Behind him, a small creature was steadily advancing, bearing in its arms what seemed to be another creature, which on closer inspection proved to be only a dead coat.

  Morgan. She was wearing her ugly peacoat. He heard the crunch-crunch of her footsteps in the snow and saw clouds of her breath puffing skyward at regular intervals like the effusions of an industrious locomotive. Other than her footfalls there was complete silence, the winter silence of a forgotten Eastern European suburb. They stood facing each other. She handed him the coat and a pair of her fluffy purple earmuffs. He figured it must have been the brutal cold that was filling her eyes with steady tears, because when she spoke it was in her usual collected manner. “You should come back to the house,” she said. “Tomaš and Alpha are getting a taxi. We’ll be alone. We can talk.”

  “It’s nice here,” Vladimir said, slipping on the earmuffs, gesturing at the ruined buildings and smoky ravine behind him. “I’m glad I took a walk . . . I feel much better.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but already his voice was lacking in malice. It was hard to think of a reason to hate her. She had lied to him, yes. She had not trusted him the way lovers sometimes trust one another. And so?

  “I’m sorry about what I said,” Morgan said. “I talked with Tomaš.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Vladimir said.

  “Still, I’d like to apologize . . .”

  Vladimir suddenly reached out and rubbed his hands on her cold cheeks. It was the first contact they had had in hours. He smiled and heard his lips crack. The situation was clear: They were two astronauts on a cold planet. He was, for his part, a gentle dissembler, a dodgy investment guru with his hands in many pockets. She was a terrorist who drove tent stakes into the ground, who cradled mewing stray cats in her arms, not to mention the poor Tomaš. Vladimir was weighing his words to best describe this arrangement, but soon found himself speaking rather indiscriminately. “Hey, you know, I’m proud of you, Morgan,” he said. “This thing, this blowing up the Foot, I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I’m glad you’re not just another Alexandra editing some stupid lit mag with a funky Prava address. You’re like on a . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of Peace Corps mission . . . Except with Semtex.”

  “C4,” Morgan corrected him. “And nobody’s going to get hurt, you know. The Foot’s going to—”

  “I know, implode. I’m just a little worried about you. I mean, what if they catch you? Can you imagine yourself in a Stolovan jail? You’ve heard the babushkas’ war cry. They’ll send you to the gulag.”

  Morgan narrowed her eyes in thought. She rubbed her mittens together. “But I’m an American,” she said. She opened her mouth again, but there was nothing more to say on the subject.

  Vladimir absorbed her arrogance and even laughed a little. She was an American. It was her birthright to do as she pleased. “Besides,” Morgan said, “everybody hates the Foot. The only reason it didn’t get knocked down is because of official corruption. We’re just doing what everyone wants. That’s all.”

  Yes, blowing up the Foot was actually democratic. A manifestation of the people’s will. She really was an emissary from that great proud land of cotton gins and habeas corpus. He remembered their first date all those months ago, the eroticism of her snug bathrobe and easygoing ways; once again, he wanted to kiss her mouth, lick the brilliant white pillars of her teeth. “But what if you do get caught?” Vladimir said.

  “I’m not the one that’s gonna blow it up,” Morgan said, wiping her teary eyes. “All I’m doing is storing the C4, because my apartment is the last place anyone would look.” She reached over and fixed his earmuffs so that they corresponded directly with his ears. “And what if you get caught?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Vladimir asked. Him? Caught? “You’re talking about this PravaInvest shit?” he said. “It’s nothing. We’re just ripping off a few rich people.”

  “It’s one thing to steal from that spoiled Harry Green,” Morgan said, “but getting Alexandra and Cohen hooked on some awful horse drug . . . that’s fucked up.”

  “It’s really that addictive, huh?” Vladimir said. He was heartened by the fact that she was assigning relative values to his misdeeds—drug dealing, bad; investor fraud, less bad. “Well, maybe I should phase that stuff out,” he said. He looked to the overcast skies pondering his horse tranquilizer’s vast profit margins, substituting horse powder for stars.

  “And that Groundhog,” Morgan said. “I can’t believe you would want to work for someone like that. There’s, like, nothing redeeming about him.”

  “They’re my people,” Vladimir explained to her, holding his hands up to demonstrate the messianic concept of my people. “You have to understand their plight, Morgan. The Groundhog and Lena and the rest of them—it’s as if history’s totally outflanked them. Everything they grew up with is gone. So what are their options now? They can either shoot their way through the gray economy or make twenty dollars a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk.”

  “But don’t you find it dangerous to be around maniacs like that?” Morgan asked.

  “I suppose,” Vladimir said, enjoying the furrowed look of concern on her face. “I mean there’s this one guy, Gusev, who keeps trying to kill me, but I think I’ve nailed him pretty good for now . . . You see, I usually whip the Groundhog in the bathhouse with birch twigs . . . It’s like this ceremonial thing that I do . . . And Gusev used to . . . Well, for one thing, Gusev is this murderous anti-Semite—”

  He stopped. For a few frozen moments the burden and the limitations of Vladimir’s life seemed to float along on his breath like cartoon captions. By then, they had been standing on the extraterrestrial surface of Planet Stolovaya for over ten minutes with only their earmuffs and mittens providing life support. The wintry landscape and the natural loneliness it engendered was taking its toll; at once, without prompting, Vladimir and Morgan embraced, her ugly peacoat against his fake-fur–collared overcoat, earmuff to earmuff. “Oh, Vladimir,” Morgan said. “What are we going to do?”

  A gust of tire-factory smoke disgorged itself from the ravine and took on the shape of a magical jinni just released from his glassy prison. Vladimir pondered her reasonable question, but came up with one of his own. “Tell me,” he said, “why did you like Tomaš?”

  She touched his cheek with her arctic nose; he noticed that her proboscis always seemed a bit more globular and full-bodied at night, perhaps the work of shadows and his failing eyesight. “Oh, where do I start?” she said. “For one thing, he taught me everything I know about not being American. We were penpals in college, and I remember he’d send me these letters, these endless letters I could never completely understand, about subjects I knew nothing about. He wrote me poems with titles like ‘On the Defa
cement of the Soviet Rail Workers’ Mural at the Brezhnevska Metro Station.’ I guess I took Stolovan and history classes just to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And then I landed in Prava and he met me at the airport. I can still remember that day. He looked absolutely hopeless with that sad face of his. Hopeless and darling and also like he desperately needed me to touch him and to be close with a woman . . . You know, sometimes that’s a good thing, Vladimir, to be with a person like that.”

  “Hmm . . .” Vladimir decided that he had heard just about enough on the subject of Tomaš. “And what about me—” he started to say.

  “I liked that poem you read at the Joy,” Morgan said, kissing his neck with her glacial lips. “About your mother in Chinatown. You know what my favorite line was? ‘Simple pearls from her birthland . . . Around her tiny freckled neck.’ It was awesome. I can totally see your mother. She’s like this tired Russian woman and you love her even though you’re so different from her.”

  “It was a stupid poem,” Vladimir said. “A throwaway poem. I have very complicated feelings for my mother. That poem was just bullshit. You have to be very careful, Morgan, not to fall in love with men who read you their poetry.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Morgan said. “It was nice. And you were right when you said that you and Tomaš and Alpha had a lot in common. Because you do.”

  “I had meant that in an abstract sense,” Vladimir said, thinking of Tomaš’s psoriasis-scarred face.

  “See, here’s the thing about you, Vladimir,” she said. “I like you because you’re nothing like my boyfriends back home and you’re nothing like Tomaš either . . . You’re worthwhile and interesting, but at the same time you’re . . . You’re partly an American, too. Yeah, that’s it! You’re needy in a kind of foreign way, but you’ve also got these . . . American qualities. So we have all these overlaps. You can’t imagine some of the problems I had with Tomaš . . . He was just . . .”

  Too much of a good thing, Vladimir thought. Well then, here was the scorecard: Vladimir was fifty percent functional American, and fifty percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath. He was the best of both worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola, blue-light specials, and the prospect of a quick pee during commercial breaks.

  “And we can go back to the States when all this is over,” Morgan said, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him back to her panelak with its promise of stale Hungarian salami and a glowing space heater. “We can go home!” she said.

  Home! It was time to go home! She had selected her quasi-foreign mate of a line-up of wobbly candidates, and soon it would be time to head back to Shaker Heights. Plus, as an added bonus, she didn’t even have to declare him at customs; Citizen Vladimir had his own shiny blue passport embossed with a golden eagle. Yes, it was all coming together now.

  But how could Vladimir abandon all that he had achieved? He was the King of Prava. He had his very own Ponzi scheme. He was avenging himself for his entire rotten childhood, swindling hundreds of people who most likely deserved his vengeance. He was going to make Mother proud. No, he wouldn’t go home!

  “But I’m making money here,” Vladimir protested.

  “It’s okay to make some money,” Morgan said. “We could always use the money. But Tomaš and I are going to wrap it up with the Foot pretty soon. We’re thinking maybe April or so for the detonation. You know, I can’t wait for that damn thing to explode already.”

  “Eh . . .” Vladimir paused. He was attempting, momentarily, to order and catalog her entire psychology. Let’s see. Blowing up the Foot was an act of aggression against the father, right? Therefore, Stalin’s Foot represented the authoritarian constraints of a Middle American family, ja? A Day in the Life of Morgan Jenson, that sort of thing. So her panic attacks were gone because, to quote her campus shrink, Morgan was lashing out. At the Foot. With Semtex. Or C4, rather.

  “Morgan—” Vladimir started to say.

  “Come on,” she said. “Walk faster. I’ll make us a bath. A nice warm bath.”

  Vladimir dutifully increased his pace. He looked back once more at the condemned panelaks and at the blazing ravine, and noticed the quadruped figure of a stray dog pawing the edge of the precipice, trying to see if it could slip down to the warmth of the tire factory without losing its canine footing. “But Morgan!” Vladimir shouted, yanking her coat sleeve, suddenly worried about the most elemental thing of all.

  She turned around and presented him with the Face of the Tent, the halo of sympathy he had found in her eyes after he had climbed on top of her. Oh, she knew what he wanted, this shivering homeless Russian man in a pair of purple earmuffs from Kmart-Prava. She grabbed his hands and pressed it to her heart buried deep beneath her peacoat. “Yes, yes,” she said, hopping on one foot to keep warm. “Of course, I love you. Please just don’t worry about that.”

  33. LONDON AND

  POINTS WEST

  HE LEARNED NOT to worry about it. He put his arms around her. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. She must have done likewise.

  Their devotion to their strange projects was inspiring. They were as busy as New York office workers and Vladimir, for his part, just as productive. By the end of the year the PravaInvest juggernaut had rumbled across the expatriate landscape to collect over five million U.S. dollars through sales of its uncommon stock, its brisk business in veterinarian supplies, and the quick turnover at the Metamorphosis Lounge. The FutureTek 2000 even presented the public with a shiny plastic box labeled “fax modem.”

  The dedicated staff was mobilized. Kostya took the financial reigns, František ran the burgeoning agit-prop machine, Marusya performed daily miracles out in the opium fields, Paavo dropped “phat” beats with distinction, and Cohen even managed to turn out a spiffy little literary journal.

  Yes, a lot had happened to Cohen since the misadventure with Gusev and the skinheads, his much-trumpeted liaison with Alexandra being but one long ostrich feather in his mighty rabbit-fur cap. Recently, for example, Vladimir’s friend had delved into Cagliostro in a way that, clearly, he had never delved into anything before. Each week he managed to spend at least fifty hours at the computer, surprising himself with what his single-mindedness and organizational skills could accomplish even when creativity failed. Cohen was even planning to use his night of Gusevian woe as a starting point for a long essay on the failings of Europe and, unavoidably, his father.

  Satisfied of his subordinates’ entrepreneurial zeal, Vladimir allowed himself a month in the West with Morgan. The first week of March found them in Madrid running from club to club with a group of friendly Madrileños who chased after the night’s pleasure with the zest of Americans dashing after Pamplona bulls. Weeks two and three were spent in Paris, particularly at a mellow Marais boîte where some kind of fusion jazz was served up with a course of cheeses, and much champagne was consumed. By the fourth week Vladimir woke up at London’s Savoy Hotel, as if hoping that its proximity to the financial doings of London’s City would cure his hangover with a shot of Anglo mercantilism. Sobriety was desperately needed: Cohen had talked him into a trip to Auschwitz some thirty hours later. “For my essays,” he had said.

  Vladimir spent the day in the bathtub, alternately soaking himself then getting up to shower. It was a beast to behold, this shower: four separate heads that attacked from all angles: a regular spray from on top, a drip by shoulder level, a fountain straight to the hip, and a risqué geyser that rammed into Vladimir’s genital area (to be used sparingly, that one). When he was dizzy from shower, Vladimir would sink back into the tub and thumb through the Herald Tribune, which thankfully had little to say that day, much like Vladimir himself.

  With darkness only a few hours away, Vladimir dried his newly plump little body and started dressing for the evening. Morgan was still passed out, her behind lifting and falling slowly beneath the sheets in keeping with her subdued breath; she was dreaming perhaps of her
terrorism or some long-dead family pet. After admiring this sight for a bit Vladimir gazed out the window where he could see a sliver of the Thames and a rain-soaked shoulder of St. James. Part of the view was taken up by a lonely skyscraper off in the distance, which, Vladimir had read in the hotel’s glossy literature, was a new development called Canary Wharf, billed as the tallest building in Europe. An architectural nostalgic, Vladimir recalled one of the last times he had spent with Baobab, sitting up on his friend’s roof, looking at the lone tower they were building across the East River in Queens.

  He watched the Wharf for an indeterminate amount of time, letting himself be taken back to the days when Challah and Baobab could still count as the sum total of his affections; when through their failings he could draw comparative strength; when that childish feeling of superiority had been enough to sustain him. By the end of this reverie he found that his mobile had crawled into his hand. The dial tone hummed, indicating that the phone had been engaged.

  He had forgotten Baobab’s number, although once it was etched into his memory along with his social security number—both were now casualty to the passage of time and the efficacy of Stolovan spirits. The only connection he was still capable of making across the Atlantic was to Westchester, and for that, too, the time had come.

  Mother, woken up from her deep weekend slumber, could only conjure up her requisite “Bozhe moi!”

  “Mother,” said Vladimir, amazed at how superfluous that word had become to his insane life, when only three years ago it had prefaced nearly every utterance.

  “Vladimir, get out of Prava now!”

  How did she know he had moved to Prava? “Pardon—”

  “Your friend Baobab called. The Italian boy. I could not understand him, he is beyond understanding, but you are obviously in danger . . .” She paused to catch her breath. “Something about a fan, a man with a fan, he’s determined to murder you and Russians are involved. Your dimwitted friend has been trying to reach you frantically and so have I, but the operator in Prava knows nothing of you, as can be expected . . .”