The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Hi, friend,” said the barkeep in near-perfect English, as if the waves of the Pacific were stroking the sands of Malibu outside. “What can I do for you?”

  Vladimir enumerated a lengthy list of booze while the bartender carefully looked him over. “Tell me, where did you come from?” he finally asked.

  Vladimir told him.

  “I have been there,” the barkeep said and shrugged, obviously not impressed by the City on the Hudson. He moved on to another customer, a worker wearing nothing but a desperate grin and a cap of a striking blue color.

  When he returned with the beer portion of Vladimir’s request, Vladimir asked about his friends. “Went for a smoke outside,” said the globetrotting mixologist. He bent down to Vladimir’s level and now a most non-Californian scent could be detected from beneath his lanky arms. He said: “I have a note for you. But it’s not from me, you understand?” He said this in a tone grave enough to indicate that Vladimir’s response was necessary before the note was given.

  “I understand,” Vladimir said with the same gravity, only inwardly he was excited, for he believed it to be a love note from his prostitute, and he was deeply interested in the kind of seductions she would deploy and in what form and language. He took the small, folded ribbon of purple paper from the barkeep, who immediately galloped off to the other end of the bar, and unfurled it. A carefully drawn gunsight stared back at Vladimir, and beneath in boxy letters the familiar bilingual legend:

  AUSLANDER RAUS! FOREIGNER OUT!

  It was signed collectively, “The Stolovan Skinheads.”

  Vladimir did not say, “Ah . . .” He was on his feet and walking toward the exit. The soft flesh of prostitutes, the pungency of their perfume and hair, was an obstacle course he negotiated with partial success, saying along the way, “pardon, pardon, pardon . . .” But he was thinking, Skinheads? Where? Who? The workers? They have hair. A pace or two from the door he finally saw them out of the corner of his eye—the black military jackets, the camouflage pants, ankle-high boots; the faces didn’t even register.

  Outside, the familiar darkness disturbed by smog and the distant grumble of dysfunctional Trabants, an empty dirtyard facing the rump of a low, gray municipal building, the only illumination provided by the light trailing from the bar’s open door. In front of him two skinheads appeared from different directions, both coming from outside his line of sight, coming together as if they were going to meld into a single unit, as if he was suffering from double vision and there was really only one set of gritted teeth, one pair of busted lips, and only one black swastika painted on an orange T-shirt below.

  Vladimir turned around. The space between him and the bar door was rapidly filling up with young men and determined expressions; it was evident that the workers and the prostitutes in this town were not the only ones who formed identical cadres, for the enforcers of local ethnic purity resembled one another to the last detail. Perhaps they were all fathered by the same bald, slightly overweight man with his fists always squeezed by his side, and one eye permanently squinted as if against the oncoming glare of the African sun.

  Then their ranks broke to admit one who was surely their leader—a head taller, broad-shouldered but thin, with a pair of contemporary wire-rims and the urgent, piercing gaze of a young German intellectual let loose in an American graduate program. The tall one looked down at Vladimir’s head as if it were a breeding ground for baby hydras and said, “Passport!”

  Vladimir exhaled for the first time. He remembered, for some reason, that he didn’t have a Soviet passport where his nationality would be listed as “Jew,” and from this particular fact he allowed himself the idea of a loophole. No, it wasn’t going to end like this. An entire life, a special little creature, an existence whose precariousness was its very leitmotif, extinguished at the hands of morons! “No! No passport!” he said. “Groundhog!” he shouted in Russian, in the direction of the bar.

  The leader looked toward his men. “Jaky jazyk?” he barked. This was similar enough to Russian for Vladimir to understand: “What language?”

  “Turetsky,” one of the skinheads happily said, smashing a fist into his palm. Turkish.

  The intellectual fixed his gaze on Vladimir once again. He was starting to work on a smirk of his own, which considerably united his appearance with those of his comrades. “You are from Arabia!”

  Arabia. Arabia! Could it be they were looking for a different kind of Semite? “No Arabia!” Vladimir shouted, waving his hands dangerously close in the direction of the leader. “America! I am America!” He happily remembered the extremist fervor of some of his Zionist classmates in Hebrew school. “Arabia, tphooo!” He spit—unfortunately, on his shoe. “Islams . . .” He brought a mock trigger to his head and shot himself, “Boom!” although really he ought to have been shooting somewhere else, in the direction of the imaginary Arab, perhaps. Laughter broke out among the ranks at this self-indicting gesture, but it quickly got lost amid a volley of inimical snorts and a tightening of the ethnic-cleansing cordon sanitaire around Vladimir. Some of the hooligans were already spreading their legs apart, the better to keep their balance during the one-serving pogrom to come.

  “Look,” Vladimir said and, with hands shaking and vision blurred from the tears he could no longer control, tried to extricate his wallet from his jeans. “Give me a minute . . . Please, what will it hurt you . . . Look . . . American Express . . . American Express . . . And this is a New York State driver’s license. You gentlemen ever been to New York? I know plenty of skinheads there. We go raise hell in Chinatown sometimes . . .”

  The leader examined Vladimir’s exhibits and then, in what Vladimir saw through his betraying tears as a foreboding gesture, put them into his own wallet, stepped back an inch, and nodded to the ground where he once stood.

  “Please,” Vladimir said in Stolovan. He was ready to say it again.

  A fist landed above Vladimir’s right eye, but before that pain was fully realized there was the sensation of flight and then the feeling of his body breaking up against the ground, his tailbone emitting a crack as the pain radiated outward from a hundred terminuses, and then a great cheer went up, although he didn’t understand the exact word (hurrah?), then a girder, it would seem, landed against his ribcage and then one, two more on the other side, flashing in bright childhood yellows then receding to darkness and the aftershocks of pure pain, and then someone had jumped on his clenched fist and—bozhe moi, bozhe moi—there was that cracking again, the cracking you could feel in the back of your mouth, the cheering again (hurrah?), Morgan . . . wake up in Prava, shto takoie? which language? pochemu nado tak? my God, not like this, svolochi! you have to breathe, nado dyshat’, breathe, Vladimir, and your mama will bring you . . . zhirafa prinesyot . . . a stuffed giraffe . . . ya hochu zhit’! I want to live! to continue to exist, to open your eyes, to run, to say to them, “No!”

  “No!” Vladimir raised a broken fist into the air and swung it at a target that wouldn’t present itself. His eyes opened simultaneously and he saw two figures standing in the direct light of the bar. For a second his eyes focused, then unfocused, then, through an extraordinary ripple of pain charging through his spine like current, focused once more. He couldn’t make out their expressions exactly, only that Gusev was nodding, while the Groundhog was looking straight ahead. And then, Vladimir let his fist drop. He saw a boot’s wedge of steel making its way expressly toward his face and said, in two languages at the same time: “Come on.”

  “Davai.”

  36. IN HAPPIER TIMES

  HE IS WALKING from her dormitory; it is the first time they have slipped their hands into each other’s pants. He is walking through the town square, a meticulously planted conglomerate of trees, lawns, and flowerbeds, which the Midwestern college maintains to remind itself of its less progressive Eastern brethren. It is morning. The clouds extend practically to the tops of the leafless oaks and a light drizzle sweeps in out of nowhere as if to remind the pedestrian of what
clouds are all about. And yet, in one of the vagaries of Midwestern weather, this overcast February morning suddenly achieves an unlikely springlike temperature, conveyed through a wind as warm as the gust of a hair dryer.

  He is wearing a heavy brown overcoat bought by Mother in anticipation of this bedeviling climate. Today, unlike frigid yesterday, he has unbuttoned it to the hilt and stuffed his scarf in his pocket, ignoring his mother’s decades-old advice to “never let your guard down when warm weather suddenly appears, Vladimir. It is a silent killer, like venereal disease.” But Mother is nowhere in sight, and he is free to catch both cold and gonorrhea.

  This thought, in particular, makes him smile, and he stops in the middle of the square and puts his hand up to his nose, the one that had recently gone inside his new lover’s utilitarian cotton underwear, had even gotten a rash from rubbing against its harsh elastic strap, then sniffs his other hand to compare. What animal smells she harbors, that sleek, soignée Chicagoan with her fashionable pageboy cut and strong Marxish opinions.

  Ave Maria! It is the first time he had put his hand inside there. He has always imagined the first time would be with some castoff, a large, insipid girl even more scared then he was. Now everything has changed. Now he is standing in the middle of the square, rethinking it all, calculating his bounty with different functions: subtracting Leningrad, dividing by Baobab, adding the Chicagoan, and multiplying it all by his nascent ability to shed his past and become Educated American Man, one bored but ultimately happy superhero.

  That pleasant moment in the town square lasts so long that he will remember it even when the particulars of his first tussle with another’s genitalia will lose their distinctness. He will remember it just so: the birds confused by the weather chirping away, clinging to the leafless trees whose branches creak and tremble under the birds’ weight as if they, too, are being reanimated by the warmth; the bare copses, regal and long, stretching the length of the college’s ivied, pink-granite cathedral, recently reformed into a godless student union; the neo-Victorian turrets of the humanities building, once bustling with Pynchonites and Achebians, now abandoned to the intellectual ennui that settles in by spring term. Yes, this apparition, this beautiful and unlikely flora and fauna are finally his. Vladimir College, founded 1981, by the last wave of hopeful Leningrad Grain Jews disembarking at JFK and penetrating a thousand versts inland to mingle their sons and daughters with the new world’s soft and fuzzy liberal elite. Thank you Momma and Poppa Girshkin for the $25,000 per year in tuition and costs. It will all work out in the end. I will not be a disappointment.

  He makes sure he is the only person standing in the square’s brief morning light, then embraces himself tightly the way he imagines the Chicagoan will do all night when she falls completely in love with him, when they begin to hammer out their plans of marriage after graduation. So far, they have spent their first night in a supine position, mostly out of the embarrassment of facing each other in bed, and he has developed all sorts of aches from the unfamiliarity of her grounded mattress. But he takes the pain in stride as evidence of his adventure, and, for the time being, he cannot imagine love’s other malevolent pains, the vast penalties for casual infractions and trust misplaced. Although, truth be told, this particular ache hurts like hell too. And so he decides to head to his own dormitory, to his kind and sedulous Jewish roommate from Pittsburgh who will not be loath to fire up the bong on a special occasion like this. And then to get some sleep, finally.

  HE OPENED HIS eyes for a moment of incalculable brevity, then closed them as the weight of his eyelids had become oppressive. In the darkness the pain seemed disseminated, a condition common to every part of his body as opposed to the several sites that through cast and bandage had been designated ground zero. But what he saw, in that burst of light and cognizance, was more than he needed to see. A cracked, mildewed tile, its hue a green, which undermined all greenness. Imagine a plant has been taken to a dank factory basement and there taught to reject all it once treasured—the air, the dew, the light and the chlorophyll—until the wilted thing resigns itself to making friends with the basement boiler. And then, in that instant, over that chipped, malformed tile, the outline of a fan blade passed with an anguished whoosh. A slow and ancient fan, its contours bulbous like the rear of a Studebaker.

  He knew then the reality of the matter. Not the Midwest’s gray sky above him, but Stolovaya’s. And he remembered his last thought before he had lost consciousness, the graceless final option of a man without a country: Escape. He could already imagine his getaway plane, which, under the influence of the dated ceiling fan, had become a silver Trans-World stratoliner, its four propellers buzzing past sepia-toned clouds with thirty passengers and five crew members, headed for La Guardia Field.

  His woke up to find his wrist warm, as if a localized fever had struck. This feeling was particularly disconcerting because south of the wrist lay a heavily anaesthetized void: his hand, likely a jumble of straight things twisted and smooth enclosures undone, no Trans-World stratoliner, rather the modern wreckage of a Boeing in a scrub field, bodies scattered about.

  Morgan had slipped a hand around his wrist. She was pressing her index finger into it, measuring the pulse. She had on a straw hat with a daisy, beneath which her face was not just sad, but of a sadness—that is, sad and luminous. Her unpainted lips were chapped from worried nail-biting, a distant approximation of Vladimir’s lips split by a boot. Immediately, Vladimir deduced that the hat with the daisy was as much an effort to seem unaged by this experience as an attempt at levity for his benefit.

  “Morgie,” he said. And then he remembered what this was all about. “I live.”

  “You’re going to live a long time,” she said, maneuvering around the bandages to kiss his nose. “We’re both going to live a long time. And be happy, too.”

  And be happy, too. Vladimir closed his eyes and considered this. It almost didn’t matter if she was right or wrong. He took in a deep breath, as deep as he could with his lungs brushing against surfaces ruptured and organs impaired. She smelled salty and vital. Her hat fell off as she leaned over him and a curtain of hair brushed against his face, some getting trapped in his hungry nose.

  “I live,” Vladimir said, squeezing tight the fist that had survived.

  TWENTY MINUTES INTO his visit, Kostya was still pulling out apricots and bananas, along with dozens of mortally wounded local violets and gardenias from the outdoor market. He set up this harvest on the sills of Vladimir’s twin windows, which looked out onto a silent New Town back street, bowing all the while as if he were offering sacrifices to a gilded Buddha.

  Kostya had already apologized, professed his innocence, and crossed himself a thousand times. He had read Vladimir a letter from the Groundhog, written in a half-literate Russian, a letter whose gist was: “We men, if we must to be called men, must not let slights go unpunished.”

  The slight was then specified: “My poor, sick father . . .How could you betray him? And after all he has had to live through: Marriage and immigration, the Soviet navy and the American projects, the Stalin years and the early 90s recession. And I was no blessing as a kid, either, as you can imagine.”

  A settlement was offered: “We have fixed each other good, Vladimir. But now everything is solved and ended. Now we have work to do. There must be no more hurting and beating, only friendship and respect. You will heal and then we will go to the restaurant where you sang so well and I will pay for the dinner and wine.”

  And finally a postscript: “I could have had them kill you.”

  Kostya removed the last piece of fruit from his gym bag. He polished the apple with his hankie and carefully placed it on Vladimir’s stomach. “Eat it immediately,” he said. “This kind of apple quickly turns brown on the inside.” He must have seen in this a fitting analogy for himself, for he clasped his hands to his powerful stomach, as if shoring up his guts, and said, “My God, those animals! They will suffer tenfold for this when their time of reckonin
g comes. And they will suffer eternally. Although it must be said, if one is to speak truthfully, that you have sinned against them as well, Vladimir. You have betrayed the trust of an old man. Of an invalid! And as for the Groundhog . . . he pays us handsomely, no? For all his pathologies, he is a kind man in his own right. And mostly he treats us like brothers.”

  Vladimir moved a fraction so that the apple rolled off the side of the bed and sent Kostya scrambling. He wanted to be surrounded by friends, not by the man who had trained his body for eight months only to allow for its destruction within minutes. “Tell the Groundhog to forget it,” Vladimir said. “I will have nothing more to do with this organization. I am leaving the country. And you better get out of this business as well, before they nail you to the cross like your friend there.”

  “Please don’t talk like that, Vladimir,” Kostya said, polishing the apple with renewed vigor. He looked very Western these days in his tattersall Brooks Brothers shirt and tan chinos, but his frightened eyes reminded Vladimir of an old, toothless peasant, the kind he had only seen in picture books of Russia. “Now is the time to renew faith, not deny it,” Kostya was saying. “And I wouldn’t think of leaving the country if I were you. The Groundhog will certainly not allow it. There’s a guard outside the room and the front and back entrances to the hospital are also guarded. I’ve seen it myself, Vladimir. They won’t let you go. Have an apricot, please . . .”

  “I will call the American embassy!” Vladimir said. “I am still an American citizen. I know my rights.”