The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  After graduating the institute with top honors, Vladimir’s grandmother became a resounding success at an orphanage for emotionally disturbed children. While the frilly Petersburg women shunned the traditional disciplinary aspects of child-rearing, Grandma singlehandedly beat the crap out of hundreds of wayward young boys and girls, who in a matter of days were on their knees, singing “Lenin Lives on Forever.” This when they weren’t repolishing the balustrades, waxing the floors, or combing the neighborhood sidewalks for scrap metal, which Grandma convinced them would somehow be recycled into a tank they could all take for rides about town. Within a year, this no-nonsense approach, fresh from the cane-wielding, belt-swinging provinces, had yielded such spectacular results that nearly all the children were deemed no longer emotionally disturbed. Indeed, many of them achieved prominence in all walks of Soviet life, the majority with the military and security organs.

  After her tenure at the orphanage, Grandma was given a cheap plastic medal and an entire grammar school to lord over. But the most enduring aspect of her success was her ability to get the Girshkins out of bleak, industrializing Kamenets-Podolsk and into a spacious clapboard house on the outskirts of Leningrad. This first move spared the family a confrontation with the SS and their cheerful Ukrainian cohorts, while Grandma’s second move, evacuation of the family before Leningrad fell under siege, saved the Girshkins from starvation and the shells of the Wehrmacht. How Grandma managed to pull the right strings and get all thirty Girshkins on the train to the Urals, where a partly-Jewish cousin, thrice removed, peacefully herded sheep in the shadows of an ore-smelting plant, was anyone’s guess. The old woman guarded the truth like an NKVD file, but it was no mystery, really. Anyone who could reform an entire orphanage, or, more significantly, push Vladimir’s dreamy and forgetful father through ten years of Soviet medical school (granted, it usually took five), could easily secure passage across the choked rail arteries of wartime Russia.

  AND THAT, THOUGHT Vladimir, was the woman who had kept his family out of Stadtkamp Auschwitz II–Birkenau. If he possessed even the trace of doubt of an agnostic, now would be the time to mumble what he remembered of the Mourner’s Kaddish. But with Hebrew school resolving the last enigmas of the empty heavens above, Vladimir could only smile and remember the feisty Grandma he once knew as a child.

  He looked down the tracks where Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen’s visit. By this time the tour group had reached the tracks and started toward them at a leisurely pace—perhaps the pond of human ashes had had a debilitating effect and the worldly tour group was beating it back to the barracks.

  Perhaps he was being judgmental.

  Oh, it was high time to get out of here! Every thought inappropriate, every gesture a heresy. Enough! Look how his grandmother had escaped the gas and the bombs, investing body and soul in the Soviet system that ultimately took as many lives as the Teutonic evil streaming through the borders in columns of panzer and precision-strafing from above. Her lesson to Vladimir was as clear as it should have been for his fellow Jews interned in the pond of ashes down the track: Get out while you can and by any means necessary. Run, before the goyim get you, and get you they will, no matter how many laps you cover with Kostya and how much they claim to love you while the absinthe flows.

  Vladimir turned to the main lookout tower, the direction from which the trains came with so much of their human freight already perished, from Bucharest and Budapest, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Warsaw and Cracow, Bratislava and . . . could it be? . . . Prava. His golden Prava. The city that had treated his ailing ego as kindly as the springs of Karlsbad once treated gout. Get out! But how? And to what salvation? He thought of Grandma, forty years after Stalin died, huddled over volume seven of the Social Security Regulations with sleepless eyes, her magnifying glass at the ready, trying to figure out the meaning of “residual functional capacity.”

  Oh, to hell with this twentieth century that was almost at an end, with all its problems still intact and flourishing, and the Girshkins, once again, the brunt of the joke, the epicenter of the storm, the clearinghouse for global confusion and uncertainty. To hell with . . . Vladimir heard the singular sound of a zoom lens extending behind him and then the snap of a shutter. He turned. Behind him the tour group was paces away. A ruddy-cheeked middle-aged woman, as tall, thin, and neatly groomed as the poplars that surrounded Birkenau, was scrambling to deposit her camera into her crowded handbag, her eyes darting everywhere except in the direction of Vladimir. She had taken a picture of him!

  The rest of the Germans also skirted the ground with their light-hued eyes, some glancing back at the offending photographer with likely malice. Amazingly, most of them looked to be in their seventies—large and healthy, with becoming wrinkles and just the perfect white cardigan sweaters for an informal afternoon—that is to say, they were old enough to have been in Birkenau in a different capacity some half a century ago. Should Vladimir, then, have spread out his chest, raised his head high to show off his dark Semitic curls, and then have said to them with a sardonic smile, “Cheese?”

  No, leave such gestures to the Israelis. Our Vladimir could only smile shyly as the Germans approached, his shoulders hunched forward submissively, the way his parents had once approached the sour-pussed immigration officials at JFK.

  Their tour guide was a handsome young man not much older than Vladimir although certainly younger-looking. He wore his thick hair long, and the granny-glasses lost amid his square, salubrious face likely contained plain, noncurative glass. There were pockets of loose flesh around his still-muscular chest and belly, giving the impression of a strapping country youth idled by a string of poor harvests. That was, in fact, the impression he gave Vladimir: a sensitive provincial man who had learned of liberalism and the German debt from a galvanic local teacher, a hippie from the time when hippies held sway over the land, and now he had himself joined the progressive ranks and took the blighted older generations to see the handiwork of their times. What a concept, thought Vladimir, neither impressed nor appalled.

  His eyes met those of the tour guide who smiled and nodded as if this meeting had been prearranged. “Hi,” he said to Vladimir, his voice trembling even for the duration of that minuscule syllable.

  “Hello,” Vladimir said. He brought up his hand in a formal gesture of greeting. He tried to recall instantly what it meant to look “grave,” but knew he couldn’t pull it off on the spot, not with the tumult of the past few days under his belt. He continued with his shit-eating grin.

  “Hello,” answered the tour guide as he filed past Vladimir. His elderly charges followed. With the ice seemingly broken by their leader, they were now able to look Vladimir briefly in the eye and even manage a little sympathetic smile. Only the middle-aged woman, the one who had dared to photograph Vladimir, the Live Jew of Birkenau, had increased her pace while staring resolutely ahead.

  Thank you, come again, Vladimir thought to say, but instead he sighed, looked once more at the departing mane of the thoughtful young tour guide—his better in every aspect, despite the rotting branches of the German’s family tree—and considered yet again his own relative loss of place in this world; his irrevocable perdition.

  Ah, and where now, Vladimir Borisovich?

  He began his long, pensive trudge to the pond of human ashes, where his friends were already waiting for him, Cohen aghast by both the tour group and the ashes, Morgan solely by the ashes. Perhaps she could get Tomaš and Alpha to blow up the remains of Birkenau as well. Just a few more kilos of C4 and they could really take care of history.

  And then his mobile phone rang.

  “Well, well,” said the Groundhog.

  “Please don’t kill me,” Vladimir blurted out.

  “Kill you?” The Groundhog laughed. “Kill m
y clever goose? Oh, please, friend. We all knew what kind of character you were from the start. Anyone who can bamboozle half of America can surely fuck over my old man.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Vladimir whimpered. “I love your father. I love—”

  “Okay, can you please shut up,” the Groundhog moaned. “All is forgiven, just stop crying. Now, I need you back in Prava. We’ve got a strange new scheme going here.”

  “Scheme,” Vladimir mumbled. What the hell was going on in the Hog’s little mind? “A strange new scheme . . .”

  “Strange precisely because it isn’t a scheme. A legitimate venture,” the Groundhog explained. “A brewery in South Stolovaya that looks ready to expand into West European and American markets.”

  “Legitimate venture,” Vladimir repeated. His mind was barely functioning. “Did Kostya advise you of this?”

  “No, no, it’s all me,” the Groundhog said. “And you can’t let anyone know about this, not even Kostya. Especially about the fact that it’s aboveboard. I don’t want to be a laughingstock.” He then invited Vladimir to come out the following week and look over the brewery. “Without your professional opinion no venture can be consummated,” he said. “Legitimate or otherwise.”

  “I will never betray you again,” Vladimir whispered.

  The Groundhog laughed once more, a soft chortle far removed from his usual boisterous braying. Then he hung up.

  PART VIII

  GIRSHKIN’S

  END

  35. THE COUNTRY FOLK

  ON THE WAY to the southern brewery their caravan had passed seemingly the entire unremarkable oeuvre of the Stolovan landscape. Only one mountain, a compact trapezoid indistinguishable from its neighbors, drew Vladimir’s attention, for Jan announced in a proud, instructive tone that this was the mountain on which the Stolovan nation had originated. Vladimir was impressed. What a comfort to know the mountain from which your kind had once come hollering down! He imagined that if the Russians had had such a mountain it would be a great, sweeping Everest out in the Urals on which a military surveillance base would promptly be built, its RKO-style antennas arching into the heavens, announcing that the sons and daughters of the Kievan Rus had laid claim to the taiga and its grizzly bears, the Baikal and its sturgeons, the shtetl and its Jews.

  The only other point of interest on their way to the brewery was a half-built nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town, its cooling towers rising over a vast field of failing carrots in long spirals of unfinished skeletal grating, as if the meltdown had already occurred.

  The brewery town itself was a charmless little burg where the steeples of Gothic churches, the mansions of the leading merchants, indeed the town square itself had long been cleared away for a claustrophobic quadrant of graying buildings, each nearly identical, even if one was a hotel, the other an administrative center, the third a hospital. They drove straight to the hotel, its lobby a furry seventies affair crammed with prickly recliners, stale air, naked legs, and, in an homage to the leading employer of the locality, a sparkling vat of the local beer rising out of the shag carpeting like a lone Easter Island–head statue. But upstairs, in the Executive Wing (as the rooms with the brass doorknobs were designated), Vladimir felt a thrill of apparatchik camaraderie—these rust-colored, bric-a-brac-less quarters surely must have housed their share of Light Bulb Factory #27 directors and similar happy-go-lucky communist officials. If only František was here!

  Not that Vladimir lacked Soviet residue among his traveling companions: He was accompanied by the Groundhog, Gusev, and two fellows who routinely passed out before the meat course was served at the biznesmenski lunches and were rumored to be the Groundhog’s best friends from his Odessa days. One was a small hairless fellow who kept badgering Vladimir about the efficacy of minoxidil. His name was Shurik. The other one was called the Log, and looking at his withered, combative face—nine-tenths scowl, one-tenth eyebrow—one could easily see him floating lifeless down a river, belly up, blood trailing from the nail-thin indenture in the back of the head.

  Perhaps better company can be had if one knows where to find it, but Vladimir, newly happy and secure, was as excited as the first-time hostess of a slumber party. Why, even Gusev, who had once almost killed him, seemed a lion tamed as of late. On the ride in, for example, he had bought Vladimir a pastry from a roadside restaurant. Then, with all the grandness and civility befitting the Hapsburg Court, he had let Vladimir cut in front of him on the line for the pissoir.

  And so, with the world once again revolving in his direction, Vladimir was seen running about the hallways as if on spring break, shouting in a sparkling Russian: “Come see, gentlemen . . . A Coke machine that also dispenses rum!”

  His room came with a pair of twin beds and Vladimir half hoped the Groundhog would split it with him so they could stay up late, smoking noxious Mars-20 cigarettes, drinking from the same bottle, shooting the breeze about NATO expansion and loves lost. And indeed, with collegiate bravado, the Groundhog soon stuck his head into the doorway and said: “Hey, wash up, you little Yid, and we’ll hit the bar across the square. We’ll rape and pillage, eh?”

  “I’m there!” cried Vladimir.

  THIS WAS SOME bar. It was run by the local union in the basement of the former Palace of Culture and was habituated by the workers who were laboring on the nuclear power plant, and had probably been doing so since around the time Vladimir was born. Seven o’clock and already mad, hallucinatory inebriation had set in across the board. And then, as if the limits of human endurance were not yet pronounced exhausted, the whores were sent in.

  The prostitutki in this part of the world formed a stylized labor brigade. Every one around five feet, nine inches in height, as if that particular span had been adjudged most convenient for the local boys; hair hennaed till it had the consistency of a well-worn mop; breasts and bellies, stretched by births bulging corsets a dirty mauve in color. They shimmied up to the dance floor without much enthusiasm and then, in a tradition that has become diktat in the eight formerly Soviet time zones—Lights! Disco ball! ABBA!

  Vladimir’s crew had only uncapped their first beer when the whores arrived and disco fever struck. The Groundhog and his boys immediately got giggly on the scene, fingering the Polo insignia on their shirts, mumbling, “Oh, the country folk,” as if they were having a Chekhov moment of their own.

  “These women have thighs that can squeeze the life out of you,” noted little Shurik, not without appreciation.

  “But this beer,” Vladimir said. “It tastes like they keep a rusty nail in the bottle. This is the brewery that will export to the West?”

  “Pour some vodka into it,” the Groundhog said. “Look, it even suggests it on the bottle.”

  Vladimir looked over the label. Part of it did seem to read: “For best results add vodka, 6 ml.” Or maybe this was the complex name of the brewery, one could never tell with the Stolovans. “Fine,” Vladimir said and went to get a bottle of Kristal from the bar.

  An hour later he was dancing to “Dancing Queen” with the prettiest fille de nuit in the house. She was the only one that did not tower above Vladimir, and that wasn’t all that set her apart from her colleagues: She was young (although not “only seventeen,” like the dancing queen of the title), she was lanky and especially lean in the chest, and, most significantly, her eyes did not have that staged good-humored look of the other whores. No, these were the clear, disinterested eyes of a New York debutante with poor grades sent to a college in West Virginia, or else a teenager in a contemporary advertisement for jeans. Even through his considerable inebriation—for do not think that vodka, when deposited in beer, creates a neutralizing reaction—Vladimir felt an affinity with this young, damaged apprentice to the trade. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

  “Teresa,” she said in a mean, hoarse whisper, as if she was spitting the name out of her mouth forever.

  “Vladimir,” he said and bent down to kiss her speckled neck, aiming for a slot between
the carefully spaced hickeys left by others.

  But he didn’t get a chance to pounce. The Groundhog had swept him aside with one apelike swoop, and attached him to the dancing triad of Groundhog, Gusev, and the Log. They had left their three prostitutes behind (all substantial middle-aged ladies drowning in blush) and were asserting their Russianness with a kind of abbreviated Cossack dance. Crouch together, rise together, kick out one foot, kick out the other . . . “Opa!” shouted the prostitutes, their faces as red-and-white as the Polish flag. “Faster, little dove!” they encouraged Vladimir.

  But it was out of Vladimir’s hands. The force of the drunken Groundhog, pulling, pushing, swinging, squatting, was entirely responsible for Vladimir’s own sorry movements. The Groundhog was a florid mass with a coherence all its own, giving generously to the reverie around him, shouting, “One more time, brothers! For the Motherland!”

  At his first opportunity, Vladimir yelled, “Bathroom!” and ran for cover.

  In the piss house, the union had just installed automatic flushers from Germany and mirrors over the urinals. Taking advantage of this march of progress, Vladimir groomed himself: He pushed down his wild hair and tried to string the most wayward locks into loops behind his ears; he opened his mouth and examined his slick, ivory teeth; he pulled back his hairline and promised to himself to sacrifice a goat to the makers of the hair tonic minoxidil. He said to himself: Of course, I’m not going to fall in love with a prostitute, and headed out.

  By this time the ABBA selection had settled on “Chiquitita,” which, drunk or not, is a terribly difficult song to dance to. Consequently, the ranks of dancers were decaying; the picniclike tables around the dance floor began filling up with the prostitutki and their men. But nowhere could Vladimir spot the Groundhog and his crew, not to mention his young whore. Feeling abandoned and with no place to invest his excitement, Vladimir went to refill his bladder at the bar. “Dobry den’,” he told the tanned young bartender dressed in a tank top depicting an alligator playing with an American football.