The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Page 41
Kostya looked at him askance. “That will only create problems, don’t you think?” He said this a little too forcefully, without his usual pious restraint, leaving Vladimir, for the first time, in question of his allegiances. “Besides, there’s no phone in this room. Now, here, let me get the curtains. What an astoundingly beautiful day it is outside. If only you could go for a walk.”
“Please get out,” Vladimir said. “You and your fucking religion, and this fruit . . . What am I supposed to do with all this fruit?”
“Vladimir!” Kostya pressed the apple to his heart. “Say no more! God can only forgive so much! Cross yourself!”
“Jews don’t cross themselves,” Vladimir said. “We’re the ones that put Him up there in the first place, remember?” He single-handedly drew the rank bed sheets over his head, a painful maneuver that brought to fore the sum of his injuries. “Now get out!” he said from beneath his linen fortress.
A DAY PASSED into night, then the situation was reversed.
A young Slovak nurse, her eyes and hair dark like a gypsy’s, came to administer painkillers every couple of hours or so; to return the favor, Vladimir let her eat Kostya’s fruit. This nurse was as sturdy as a sausage. She flipped Vladimir over without a sigh, mindful of his fractures, then pressed the needle deep into his rear, a pain Vladimir had come to enjoy as it signified the onset of sweet giddiness.
With an entire socialist pharmacopoeia coasting through his veins, Vladimir spent his days either laughing maniacally as he tried to build an airplane out of the institutional wax paper, or, when the effects of the drugs were at their nadir, dolefully mooing to a bedside picture of Morgan, whose four-hour daily visits were obviously not enough. The times in-between he spent chattering away to himself in both Russian and English, chronicling his childhood and the end of his childhood, often pretending there was a bevy of grandchildren, small and furry, surrounding his bedside. “And when I was your age, Sari, I lived with a dominatrix in a condemned Alphabet City flat. Later, she went with my best friend Baobab, but by this time I was already a mafioso in Prava. What a business!”
But soon enough, in a week, say, Vladimir’s grandchildren became tall and beefy, their features lightened, the tips of their noses curled upward, and sweatshirts with the names of American sports teams suddenly appeared. Vladimir guessed at their lineage. He knew he was reaching some sort of a decision.
“It’ll be the perfect place to recover,” Morgan said. “You’ll see where I was brought up, the real America. And Cleveland’s so nice in the summer. And it doesn’t smell at all anymore—they’ve cleaned up the Cuyahoga River. And if you want, my father can give you a job. And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.” She lowered her voice: “By the way, Tomaš and I are almost finished with our work here. Just so you know . . .”
“Let me think about it,” Vladimir said, even as a whiff of hardy Midwestern air wormed its way through the shut windows.
And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.
The next day an adventuresome Vladimir ate a dish of soggy dumplings along with a trace of gulash minus the paprika (for health reasons, according to his doctor). He was able to flip himself over for the nurse, who said several encouraging words in her language, then slapped his butt kindly.
The nurse brought in copies of the Prava-dence, and here Vladimir could not escape Cohen’s raging commentaries about anti-Semitism and racism in Mittel Europa, in response to which Cohen was speedily organizing a march to the Old Town Square under the banner EXPATRIATES, LET YOUR DISGUST BE KNOWN! Swastikas would be burned, folk music played, and the Mourner’s Kaddish recited by a visiting dignitary for “a certain fallen friend.”
“But I’m not dead,” Vladimir reminded him when Cohen arrived along with František.
“No, no,” Cohen mumbled. “Although . . .” He did not elaborate, but instead blotted at his red eyes with both palms, creasing the unshaven portion of his face below. “Let’s have a beer,” he said and took out a bottle, which, with a great deal of clumsiness and running foam, he eventually uncapped and placed in Vladimir’s good hand.
The beer did not seem like a good idea to Vladimir, what with all the exotic drugs pumped into his posterior, but he took a few sips nonetheless. Over the course of the past nine months he had shared so many beers with Cohen that drinking this final one was akin to a memorial, and looking now at his haggard friend brimming once again with righteous energy, Vladimir was sad to think they might never see one another again. “Well, I hope your march goes as well as your work on Cagliostro,” Vladimir said. “You have a knack for these things, Perry. I’m glad you were my mentor.”
“I know, I know,” Cohen said, brushing it off, embarrassed.
“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to help me to my feet.”
They looped their arms under his shoulders, and with František’s considerable heft accounting for most of the propulsion, lifted him off the bed while he grunted and said “Ach!” On his feet, he was quickly impressed by his mobility. The feet were, with the exception of a few bruises, remarkably undamaged. His attackers had obviously been more concerned with juicier areas and most of the fractures were concentrated among his ribs, which made him feel as if his torso was a package bulging with broken glass. When he held his posture erect and did not breathe excessively, he could commute from the bed to the door easily, but any time his locomotion required a shift of the body or an extended inhalation, things got a little blurry and dark at the edges.
“I’m ready to leave,” Vladimir told them.
Cohen instantly voiced his intention of staying and fighting until every young man with a shaved head was tied up for nine hours and forced to sit through a screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but František merely shook his head (his eyes, too, now had a hard look and were ringed underneath) and said: “Perhaps you are not aware of the situation outside. The guard here and the two guards by the entrance.”
Vladimir turned to František and spread out his good hand, palm-upward, in the famous “Nu?” gesture.
“Nu?” František said. “What can I do? You understand now what our adversaries are capable of.” Then he sighed tremendously. But as the sigh exhausted itself, his face took on the pleased, royal appearance of Son of Apparatchik II. “All right, I see something, yes . . . But perhaps we should wait until your physique improves.”
“No,” Vladimir said. “It has to be now. Tell me, František . . . How much money do I have?”
František shook his head sadly. “That fool Kostya has frozen your DeutscheBank account. As a preventative measure, I was told.”
“I thought as much,” Vladimir said. “So what’s left for me here? Nothing.”
It was clear that his two friends had never expected to hear those words from Vladimir Girshkin, for immediately they came together and put their arms around his body, as gently as two men without children can do.
“Wait!” Cohen said. “What do you mean ‘nothing’? There must be something we can do! We can press charges. We can alert the media. We can . . .”
“Your girlfriend,” František whispered into Vladimir’s unbandaged ear. “She says they’re going to blow up the Foot this Friday at three o’clock precisely. The explosion will serve as a decoy.” František allowed himself a slight squeeze of the fractured former King of Prava.
“Be prepared to run,” he said.
VLADIMIR HAD AN interesting dream. In this dream he ate dinner with a normal American family that took up an enormous dining table over which hung three well-spaced chandeliers—that’s how big this normal family was.
During the meal in the dream they ate St. Peter’s fish, which was chosen for its low caloric content and not for any religious reasons. This was explained to Vladimir by a man named Gramps, who, quite normally, sat at the head of the table. Gramps had lived a long time and was knowledgeable about many topics, especially about great, big wars. He was also the only person at the table to
have a face, although it wasn’t the kind of face that, by itself, could imprint itself on the collective memory of a nation, in the manner of Khrushchev or the Quaker Oats Man.
It was an old man’s beetle-browed, double-chinned, wine-reddened face, a face that had clearly seen more good than bad through the years, even when you factored in the great, big wars—especially when you factored in the great, big ones. Yes, Vladimir never thought he would enjoy hearing about duty and courage and biting the bullet so much. And he was very polite to Gramps: When the old guy spilled gravy over the sleeve of Vladimir’s cuffed white shirt, Vladimir made a very appropriate joke, which was not in the least offensive to anyone present and seemed to put Gramps at ease. The dream ended right after Gramps had been put at ease.
Vladimir woke up pleased with his pleasantness at dinner, his stomach still purring under the gentle weight of the imaginary goy-fish. Sunlight flooded the room while a playful wind knocked at the windows. His nurse was wheeling in the breakfast cart. She was very animated, constantly pointing out the window and evidently saying a lot of nice things about the day outside. “Petak!” she said. Friday!
Vladimir nodded and said “Dobry den’ ” to her, which besides being a form of greeting also happened to mean “good day” in Stolovan.
She took out his breakfast—a single boiled egg, a piece of rye bread, and black coffee. Then, without ceremony and still gesticulating about the bountiful weather, she took out of the tray’s bottom compartment a briefcase, which she placed next to Vladimir’s good arm. “Dobry den’,” she cheered and, smiling like a dark, Indo-European angel, wheeled the breakfast tray out of Vladimir’s life.
At first Vladimir admired the briefcase itself. It was a handsome affair of taupe patent leather monogrammed with Vladimir’s initials. He even thought of Mother and wondered if the first letter of the monogram could be changed in her favor.
Inside, there was an amusement-park-for-the-adult set. The first item Vladimir noticed was, of course, the revolver. It was the only gun he had ever seen that was not attached to a cop or to one of Gusev’s men, and the idea that it was in his possession proved more hilarious than frightening. Still-life of V. Girshkin with Sidearm. The gun came with a diagrammed set of instructions, scribbled in hasty pencil: “Gun already loaded with six bullets. Release safety. Aim. Hold gun steady. Press trigger (but only after you have aimed directly at target).” Hey now, thought Vladimir. Accent or not, I am a child of America. I should know how to blow someone away instinctively.
Next to the pretty gun were stacks of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred to a stack, ten stacks in all; his U.S. passport; a plane ticket for that day’s 5:00 P.M. nonstop to New York; and a brief note: “When the nurse knocks twice, the guard outside your room has been distracted. The Foot will explode two minutes later. Run for the nearest taxi (two blocks down is Prospekt Narodna, the closest thoroughfare). Your friend will be waiting for you at the airport. Do not waste time explaining yourself to the hospital staff—they have been taken care of.”
Vladimir clasped the briefcase shut and moved one foot off the bed, aiming for his tasseled loafer from Harrods.
Just then there were two knocks at the door.
. . .Out the door Vladimir went, galloping madly, good hand around his body, a body which seemed ready to fold up like an army cot at any minute. He was rounding corner after corner, through miserable green corridors that seemed no more than an extension of his room, past innumerable older nurses with breakfast carts paying him no heed, all the while following the magic red sign bounded by an arrow and an exclamation point that surely must have meant EXIT!
Outside! into the Prava spring! a street curling away hopefully toward Prospekt Narodna, lined with ancient, bloated Fiat ambulances . . . A familiar BMW stood directly across the way from the hospital steps; two associates of the Groundhog’s, Shurik and Log, were being entertained by a trio of elephantine nurses, whose hair—three bales of loose blond straw—was lifted behind them by the wind, potentially obscuring Vladimir’s escape. It would seem the gang was clowning around with a hypodermic needle.
Three o’clock on his watch. The second hand moved five seconds forward. An orange ball overhead. A displacement in the sky. The Old Town shook. The New Town shook. The earthquake had begun.
Morgan!
Vladimir knew he had to move quickly but he could not take his eyes off the burning Foot. It was oddly reminiscent of the torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty, except this torch was far grander, blowing beautiful swirls of gray smoke over the Tavlata and into the open courtyards of the castle above. Toward the back of the Foot, where the elevator and power cables ran alongside the Heel, electrical sparks blazed into blue-white spirals of lightning, which lashed out—harmlessly, one would hope—at the Baroque forms of the Stolovan Wine Archive and Hugo Boss outlet below. Alpha had been right in his calculations: the Foot imploded, its top two-thirds collapsing into the hollow of the bottom third. This truncated, smoking Foot was truly a landmark, the proverbial “ash heap of history” around which former Cold Warriors and the economics faculty of the University of Chicago would soon gather to warm their fleshy hands.
She had done it, Morgie! She had set the skyline on fire!
But there was no time to feel pride for his strange beloved. Caught in the aftershocks of the explosion, the city continued to rumble beneath his feet, as if an endless metro train was winding its way underground. Vladimir looked to the BMW. The Groundhog’s men were crouched on the ground alongside the Stolovan nurses, looking up to the giant flaming limb. Vladimir briskly walked away from the scene, swinging his briefcase resolutely. In his pressed trousers and Prava-dence T-shirt, having shed his hospital gown, he was the consummate American businessman shunning taxi rides in favor of exercise, even if his left hand was bandaged into a fuzzy white ball, while a thick strip of gauze adorned his forehead. He breathed evenly at restful intervals in order to build energy for the next exertion, just the way Kostya had once instructed.
This was wise. As he approached the street’s curve, which would definitively take him out of the Russians’ line of sight, the twin banks of sooty buildings echoed Shurik’s unhappy voice: “HALT!”
Exert!
And he was gone, the architecture scrolling around him, an engine swiftly firing up a dozen meters behind. Now he could only feel his head and his two feet—one, two, one, two—carrying aloft the rest of his ridiculous body, like Kostya bearing his cross. And the wind! The damn wind blew the wrong way down the never-ending street like a reprimand, slamming into Vladimir’s unfortunate chest, knocking out his air supply.
A reprisal! Like a nesting doll, the side street bore a side street. Following the rules of escape, Vladimir ducked into it. But the alley must have harbored some obscure museum, for it was chock-full of melancholy school children being siphoned through, like a slow-motion running of the bulls.
Vladimir stopped, regained a single breath, and shouted: “The Russians are coming! Run!” This warning proved especially legitimate since it was shouted in Russian and against the background of a steadily exploding hundred-meter statue of Stalin’s Foot. Pandemonium broke out, with the kiddies bleating, school bags flying through the air, teachers pushing their plumpness forward into children, children squeezed into the gray plaster of buildings, falling like toy soldiers into the vestibule of a new subterranean pizza parlor. Waving his hand in the air like a flag of national resistance, Vladimir charged through, still screaming his warning; he managed to knock down only one kid—a slow, sad-looking little Kafka who reminded Vladimir very much of himself as a child. He was sorry to see him go.
Forward! Ahead, a great light spilled into the side street, a light born of uncluttered space, of an enormous boulevard, of Prospekt Narodna—the Avenue of the Nation! Still screaming his dated warning, Vladimir careened into a crowd of peace-loving lunchtime strollers, all craning their necks to see the carnage of the Foot, caught up in the universal mood of astonishment and joy.
Feeling time was on his side, Vladimir pushed through the knots of businessmen in purple suits and white socks and leapt into the middle of the street. Once again, he ran. Only now there was no duality of smashed torso and Olympian legs. There was only pain and speed! Now, the happy wind was on the right side of history, and it spoke louder than the clang of the long-beaked tram heading in his direction: VLADIMIR VICTORIOUS!
He altered his course by a hair and brushed past the cream-and-orange streetcar, catching sight of the terrified babushkas clutching their Kmart bags within, for up ahead was the storied store itself. But Vladimir couldn’t even contemplate escaping into men’s casuals, just as in his frenzy he had lost sight of his original goal: finding a taxi, of which surely a dozen green exemplars by now had passed, alongside a procession of police cars, lights ablaze, rushing toward the burning Foot.
One! two! one! two! with the legs, not stopping even for a breath until the counting became a singular onetwooo, when suddenly the Prospekt Narodna concluded itself and he had to apply the brakes.
Ahead, the hazy blue of the Tavlata and a bridge spanning its length. The thought of being trapped on the bridge with nothing but the murky river below did not appeal; Vladimir turned right on the embankment, but at this point suffered a brief convulsion. His ribs scraped against each other with the imagined sound of cutlery and an immense ball of blood anchored in phlegm rose up to coat his mouth with metal. Bent over with pain, his former speed unthinkable, Vladimir made slow progress up the embankment toward the castle in the distance.
He passed the famed restaurant where he had eaten with the Groundhog, and briefly considered taking refuge in its international quarters. Any place with nymphs on the walls and Cole Porter on the piano could not possibly play host to an afternoon assassination. But the building next to it was by far more intriguing. An enormous Stolovan tricolor hung from the ground-level window; it was distinguished by the socialist star, long since banished from similar flags. Indeed, if one strained one’s ears against the hum of the city, the “Internationale,” shrill and raspy, could be heard from within like a painful birth. Of course! The Great Hall of People’s Friendship! This was where František delivered his well-paid speeches to the old communist faithful.