The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “The man with the fan,” Vladimir said. He had wanted to say Fan Man, but it could not be said in Russian precisely that way. “Rybakov?”

  “That is what I think he said. You must call him right now. Or better yet, get on the next plane out of Prava. You can even charge the ticket to my American Express account. It’s that important!”

  “I’m not in Prava,” Vladimir said. “I’m in London.”

  “London! Bozhe moi! Every Russian mafioso has a flat in London now. So it’s just like I suspected . . . Oh, Vladimir, please come back home, we won’t make you go to law school, I promise. You can live in the house and do whatever you want, I can get you a promotion at the resettlement agency, now that I’m on the board. And, this may come as a pleasant surprise, but we’ve put away a nice sum of money in the past ten years. We must have, I don’t know . . . Two, three, fourteen million dollars. We can afford to give you a little stipend, Vladimir. Maybe five thousand a year plus subway tokens. You can live at home and do whatever it is you young, listless people do. Smoke pot, paint, write, whatever they taught you at that fucking liberal arts school, devil confound all those hippies. Just please come back, Vladimir. They’ll kill you, those Russian animals! You’re such a weak, helpless boy, they’ll wrap you in a blin and have you for supper.”

  “Okay, calm down, stop crying. Everything is fine. I’m safe in London.”

  “I’m not crying,” Mother said. “I’m too agitated to cry!” But then she broke down and started weeping with such force that Vladimir put down the phone and turned to Morgan, her form stirring beneath the blankets in response to the loudness and urgency of his voice.

  “I will call Baobab now,” he said quietly, “and if there’s truly danger, then I’ll be on the next plane to the States. I know what to do, Mother. I’m not stupid. I’ve become a very successful businessman in Prava. I was just about to send you a brochure of my new investment group.”

  “A businessman without an M.B.A.,” sniffled Mother. “We all know what kind of businessman that is.”

  “Did you hear what I said, Mother?”

  “I hear you, Vladimir. You’ll call Baobab—”

  “And I’m going to be perfectly safe. Forget about this being-eaten-in-a-blin business. Such nonsense! All right? I’m dialing Baobab now. Good-bye . . .”

  “Vladimir!”

  “What?”

  “We still love you, Vladimir . . . And . . .”

  “And?”

  “ . . . And your grandmother died two weeks ago.”

  “Babushka?”

  “Your father nearly had a nervous collapse between her death and your stupidity. He’s upstate right now, recovering with his fishing. The medical practice is losing money, but what can you do in such a situation? I had to let him go upstate.”

  “My grandmother . . .” Vladimir said.

  “ . . . has left for the other world,” Mother completed. “They had her on the tubes for a few weeks, but then she died fast. Her face looked like she was in pain when she lapsed into a coma, but the doctors said that it didn’t necessarily mean she was suffering.”

  Vladimir leaned himself against the cold window. Grandmother. Running after him with her fruit and farmer cheese at their old mountain dacha. “Volodechka! Essen!” That crazed, dear woman. To think that now the rectangle that had been his family had suddenly, with the subtraction of a single, flat EKG line, been reconfigured into a tiny triangle. To think there were only three Girshkins left. “The funeral?” Vladimir asked.

  “Very nice, your father cried an ocean. Listen, Vladimir, get on the phone with Baobab already. Your grandmother was old, life for her was not life anymore, especially with you gone from it. Oh, how she loved you . . . So, just say a prayer for her soul, and for your father, too, and for my suffering heart, and for this whole wretched family of ours on which the Lord has chosen to heap only calamity these past two quarters . . . Now go!”

  IT TOOK TWELVE rings but finally the tired, husky voice came on, sounding as unhappy as a government worker caught at his desk immediately after the five o’clock bell. “Baobab residence.”

  “Is there a Baobab I could speak to?” Vladimir said. His friend’s demented greeting made him smile. Baobab remained Baobab.

  “It’s you! Where are you? Never mind! Turn on CNN! Turn on CNN! It’s starting already! Jesus Christ!”

  “What the hell are you yelling about? Why does it always have to be hysteria. Why can’t we have a normal—”

  “That friend of yours with the fans, the one we had the citizenship for.”

  “How now?”

  “He barged into Challah’s, into your old apartment last week. He woke us up—”

  “Us?”

  Baobab sighed a long, pneumatic sigh. “After you left, Roberta married Laszlo,” he explained with aggravated patience. “They went to Utah to unionize the Mormons. So . . . I guess . . . Challah and I were both lonely . . .”

  “That’s great!” Vladimir said. With all of his selfish little heart he wished them the best. Even the idea of them having sex, the tremor of their two large bodies shaking the already shaky foundations of Alphabet City, inspired in Vladimir only joy. Good for them! “But what did Rybakov want?”

  “Dah! It’s starting! It’s starting! Turn it on! Turn it on!”

  “What’s starting?”

  “CNN, idiot!”

  Vladimir tiptoed his way into the living room, where the enormous black monolith that was the television had already been set to the news channel. He could hear the newscaster even before the picture materialized, the words Breaking News—New York’s Mayoralty in Crisis floating along the bottom of the screen.

  “ . . . Aleksander Rybakov,” the newscaster was saying in midsentence. “But to most people, he is simply . . . The Fan Man.” The reporter was an unsmiling young woman in a provincial tweed suit, hair tied into a painful bun, teeth buffed into a reflective sheen. “We were first introduced to the Fan Man three months ago,” she continued, “when his many letters to the New York Times lambasting New York’s urban decay came to the attention of the city’s mayor.”

  “Aaah!” Vladimir shouted. So he’d done it. He’d finally done it, that grizzly old loon.

  Shot of a gilded banquet room, the mayor—a tall man with a square-set face that even two powerful jaws could not stretch into a smile—standing next to a hysterically grinning Rybakov, looking slim and polished in a three-piece banker’s suit. Above them a banner read: NEW YORK CELEBRATES THE NEWEST NEW YORKERS.

  MAYOR: And when I look at this man, who has suffered such persecution in his homeland and has traveled three thousand miles just to speak out on the very same issues I believe in—on crime, on welfare, on the decline of civic society—well, I just have to think that despite all the naysayers, thank God for—

  RYBAKOV (spitting freely): Crime, tphoo! Welfare, tphoo! Civil society, tphoo!

  NEWSCASTER: Mr. Rybakov’s brash outspokenness and conservative stances certainly earned him many enemies among the city’s liberal elite.

  GRAY-HAIRED BOW-TIED LIBERAL (looking more tired than enraged): I object not so much to this so-called Fan Man’s simplistic views on race, class, and gender but to the whole spectacle of parading around a human being who is obviously in dire need of help just to serve a misguided political purpose. If this is the mayor’s idea of bread and circuses, New Yorkers are not amused.

  RYBAKOV shown behind a lectern, cradling a little fan, smiling, his eyes clouded over with pleasure, as he lovingly croons: “Faaan . . . Faaanichka. Sing ‘Moscow Nights’ for Kanal Seven, please.”

  NEWSCASTER: But the end came quickly when the mayor invited Mr. Rybakov to register to vote at an official City Hall ceremony. Television crews from around the country gathered to witness the much-ballyhooed “first vote” of the Fan Man’s life. The streets around City Hall were to be sealed off for the day for a “Fan Man Get-Out-the-Vote Block Party” complete with sturgeon and herring stands, the two staples of
the Fan Man’s diet, provided courtesy of Russ & Daughters Appetizing.

  MAYOR (holding a piece of sturgeon between thumb and index finger): I’m the grandson of immigrants. And my son is the great-grandson of immigrants. And I’ve always been proud of that. Now I want all you naturalized immigrants to go out there and vote today. If Mr. Rybakov can do it, so can you!

  NEWSCASTER: But only an hour before the ceremony was underway, reports leaked out from the mayoral administration that Mr. Rybakov was, in fact, not a citizen. INS records indicate that at a naturalization ceremony held last January, he had attacked Mr. Jamal Bin Rashid of Kew Gardens, Queens, while showering him with racial epithets.

  MR. RASHID (dressed in kaffiyeh, excited, speaking in front of his garden apartment): He is shouting at me, “Turk! Turk, go home!” And he’s hitting me on the head, baff! baff! with his, you know, with his crutch. Ask my wife, I am still not sleeping at night. My lawyer says: Sue! But I will not sue. Allah is all-forgiving and so am I.

  Cut to Rybakov at a news conference surrounded by mayor’s aides, a REPORTER shouting, “Mr. Rybakov, is it true? Are you a liar and a psychopath?”

  Slow-motion shot of Rybakov as he picks up his crutch then sends it flying across the room, where it neatly whacks the offending reporter in the head. Silent shots of melee, Rybakov being tackled by the mayor’s staff while the camera scrambles to get it all. Finally, the audio kicks in, and we hear RYBAKOV screaming: “I am citizen! I am America! Girshkin! Girshkin! Liar! Thief!”

  NEWSCASTER: Police experts were unable to identify the term “Girshkin,” but reliable sources tell us that no such word exists in the Russian language. Mr. Rybakov spent two weeks under observation at the Bellevue psychiatric center, while the mayor’s staff attempted damage control.

  MAYORAL AIDE (young, harried): The mayor reached out to this man. He wanted to help. The mayor is deeply concerned with the plight of crazed World War II veteran refugees from the former Soviet Union.

  NEWSCASTER: But it is today’s investigative report by the Daily News documenting the fact that Mr. Rybakov, here shown at the helm of his thirty-foot speedboat, has been collecting SSI benefits while living in a palatial Fifth Avenue apartment that finally threatens to bring down the mayoral administration . . . We now go live to the mayor’s news conference . . .

  “SEE! SEE!” Baobab was shouting on the other end. “See what you put me through! I’m trying to take a nap when Rybakov and this crazy Serb knock down the door, and Rybakov’s screaming, ‘Girshkin! Girshkin! Liar! Thief!’ And he’s got the crutches just like on TV. And Challah was in the kitchen dialing 911. I mean, this Fan Man makes Jordi look perfectly reasonable. Hey, how’s it going with you, anyway?”

  “Hm?”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Ah,” Vladimir said.

  “Ah?”

  “Ah,” Vladimir repeated. “No more. No more, Baobab.” He thought of Jordi. And Gusev. And the Groundhog. “Why fight it? No more.”

  “Fight it? What are you talking about? You’re three thousand miles away. Everything’s roses. I just thought you should be warned. Just in case he decides to look for you in Prava.”

  “Groundhog,” Vladimir whispered.

  “What?

  “His son.”

  “What about him?”

  “Nothing,” he said to Baobab. “Let it go.”

  “If you’re trying to quote Paul McCartney, the correct wording is ‘Let It Be.’ ”

  “I have to go,” Vladimir recovered. “Say good-bye to Challah.”

  “Hey! I haven’t spoken to you in six months. Where are you going?”

  “Concentration camp,” Vladimir said.

  34. HOW GRANDMA

  SAVED THE GIRSHKINS

  A CONVOY OF BMWs, Vladimir’s preferred method of traveling these days, pulled into the parking lot of Stadtkamp Auschwitz II–Birkenau. The lot was empty save for one tour bus, its tourists having long disembarked, its Polish driver idling away the time by lovingly cleaning his boots. Vladimir and Morgan had just flown in from London and Cohen had taken the train up from Prava. Cohen’s attempts to replace the BMWs with American autos had run into a snafu. PravaInvest’s jeeps were taking part in one of Gusev’s so-called readiness exercises, of which both NATO and the remains of the Warsaw Pact presumably were not informed. And so Vladimir and his friends were left to commute the three-kilometer distance between Auschwitz proper and its sister camp in the cars of the perpetrators.

  They climbed the steps of the main lookout tower, beneath which ran the railroad tracks that kept the ovens supplied. This was the famous tower, a shot of which is requisite in any movie about the camps. For the sake of exaggerated scale, it would seem, many directors had shot the structure from the ground up. In truth, the tower was as squat and unimposing as a station house on the Metro-North railroad.

  From the tower, however, the full extent of Birkenau was up for inspection. Rows upon rows of chimneys minus the buildings they were supposed to heat, stretched to the horizon like a collection of miniature factory stacks, bisected by the sandy path of the once busy railroad. The chimneys were all that remained after the retreating Germans, in their last public-relations gesture, dynamited the rest. But in some quadrants, rows of rectangular, ground-hugging barracks still stood, and it was easy to multiply them by the number of orphaned chimneys and in this manner to fill in the gaps of what used to be.

  Cohen, consulting his well-worn guide to Europe’s concentration camps, traced his finger against the horizon, and said in an even tone, “There. The ponds of human ashes.” This was at the edge of the field of chimneys before a forest of naked trees began. Living figures could be seen trudging against the backdrop of the forest; perhaps this was the tour group whose bus was abandoned in the parking lot.

  A lengthy cloud had passed—the late-winter sun redoubled its efforts, and Vladimir squinted, bringing his hand up to serve as a visor. “What are you thinking?” Cohen said, misinterpreting this gesture for a sign of trauma on Vladimir’s part.

  “Vladimir’s tired,” Morgan said. She understood something was wrong, but wasn’t sure if Auschwitz alone was responsible. “You’ve been tired all day, haven’t you, Vladimir?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Vladimir said, and almost bowed in gratitude for her intervention. The last thing he wanted to do was to speak to them. He wanted to be alone. He smiled and raised his finger as if to demonstrate initiative, then took the lead in descending the stairs and emerging into the forest of chimneys and surviving barracks.

  Cohen and Morgan walked beside the railroad tracks, Cohen stopping every few meters to take a damning photograph. They ducked into the barracks periodically to see the blighted conditions of the camp inmates which, of course, left much to the imagination without the human element. They were on their way to the pit of human ashes lying at the end of the tracks. Vladimir walked alone, staying midway between the main lookout tower and the forest. This was where the ramp was supposed to be located, the ramp where arrivals were separated for death, either instantly by Zyklon B or protractedly by hard labor.

  It was hard to recreate this part of the process, since only a narrow patch of dust ran off from the tracks to indicate that something had once been here. Across the tracks a sole structure stood—a rickety, wooden lookout post on a set of stilts, which reminded Vladimir of the house of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian fairy tales. Her house was supposed to be built on chicken legs that would take the Baba to wherever she felt havoc needed to be wreaked. The house could also act on its own accord, galloping through the village, trampling honest Christian folk at will.

  Vladimir’s grandmother had fulfilled the duty of Russian grandmothers and told him Baba Yaga tales as an inducement for eating his farmer cheese, buckwheat kasha, and the other insipid delicacies of their country’s diet. But as these tales were frightening indeed, Grandma tempered the carnage with helpful disclaimers, such as “I hope you know that none of our relatives was ever killed by Baba
Yaga!” Whether Grandma consciously understood the deeper significance of this disclaimer, Vladimir would never know. But it was true that practically his entire family escaped Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union. It was actually Grandma herself who was responsible for saving the Girshkins from Hitler, although homegrown Stalin proved beyond her capabilities.

  Originally, the Girshkins were situated near the Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podolsk, a town whose Jews were all but wiped out in the early phases of Operation Barbarossa. The Girshkins, even then, were prosperous. They owned not one hotel but three, all catering to stagecoach travelers and thereby constituting perhaps one of the first known examples of the motel chain. Well, certainly in the Ukraine.

  A practical clan, the Girshkins kept well abreast of the times. When the outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed a certainty, the family pooled all their gold, threw it into a wheelbarrow (which, to hear Grandma tell it, was practically full), then emptied the wheelbarrow into the local stream and resolutely trampled back home to eat up the last of their sturgeon and caviar. Having thus eluded any aspersions of being bourgeoisie, the Girshkins put their best proletarian foot forward, and this particular limb—like the lamb shank at Passover representing the strength of the Lord’s forearm—was embodied by Grandma.

  Grandma joined the Red Pioneers, then the Komsomol Youth League, and finally the Party itself. There were pictures of her playing each of these venues with her eyes ablaze and mouth crinkled painfully into a smile, looking like a heroin addict granted her fix. Looking, in other words, like the paragon of Soviet agit-prop, especially with her pendulous peasant bosom and the broadest shoulders in her province, said shoulders kept aloft by a posture that, all by itself, had won her a prize in high school. And so, with these attributes in tow, Grandma left for Leningrad. She managed to get herself admitted to the infamous Institute of Pedagogy, where the most stalwart comrades were instructed in the science of indoctrinating the first generation of revolutionary toddlers.