The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  In the distance, where the Prospekt Narodna lapsed into the river, the auto of Shurik and Log ground itself to a full and complete stop with smoking tires and all the appropriate sounds. Vladimir turned to the other direction, the direction of further escape, to catch the monstrous, sloping hood of the Groundhog’s customized Beamer easing its way onto the embankment. And so his fate was sealed.

  Past a thick velvet curtain lay the bottom floor of a spacious villa converted into an auditorium. A marble Lenin towered over an empty podium. The podium itself looked out over rows of folding chairs occupied by the Sons and Daughters of the Radiant Future—those crisp octogenarians—the grandmas still dressed in blue work dresses, their revolutionary spouses now sporting significant bosoms to which their many insignia were pinned.

  Toward the front of the room, by Lenin’s left toe, to be exact, Vladimir caught sight of the youngest person in the joint save himself. His question mark of a cowlick had always been a dead giveaway in a crowded bar. František, with the benefit of his height, noticed Vladimir as well and quickly started making his way back, managing to shake every single hand that was offered him, like a rabbi during a break in the minyan services. “What the hell?” he said, pushing Vladimir back toward the velvet curtain and the street outside.

  “I couldn’t get a cab!” Vladimir shouted.

  “Jesusmaria! How did you find this place?”

  “The flag . . . You told me . . .” Vladimir closed his eyes and remembered to breathe at any cost. He breathed. “Look, they’ve surrounded the two streets, this way and that way. They’re going to start going into buildings. Do you see what I mean?” He looked around to see if any Guardians of the Foot were present, fearful they might recognize him from Morgan’s showdown at Big Toe . . . But all the babushkas looked the same to him.

  “What about the Foot?” František said. “I felt the ground shaking. I thought—”

  “It’s gone,” Vladimir said. “Finished.”

  His voice carried all too well. Gray heads were turning, chairs squeaking backward, and the hall was soon suffused with amazed whispers of “Trotsky!”

  At first, František did not pay these rumors any notice, probably figuring that anything at all could have stirred up the waves of senility fiercely undulating through the room. Instead, he was trying to calm Vladimir, reminding him that they were in this together, that they were both fellow travelers, “men of taste in a tasteless world,” and that he would do anything to save Vladimir. But by then the disparate whispers of “Trotsky!” were united into a single proletarian chant, and the two could no longer ignore the gathering momentum. With embarrassed smiles they turned to face the People and affected a little wave of the hand.

  “Interesting,” František said, as he energetically massaged his bare temples. “How very Menshevik of them. I would never have imagined . . .But all right . . .Never mind. Shall we try for Plan Z, then? I take it you still know your Marxism-Leninism, Tovarishch Trotsky?”

  “It was my major in the Midwestern col—”

  “Then please follow me.”

  “But, of course, whatever you’re thinking is madness . . .” Vladimir started to say, but in the meantime he followed the madman faithfully to the front of the room. A flawless hush settled over the congregation, well-trained after forty years of marching happily into the future and never bowing to facts.

  With arms swinging in martial fashion and chin set firm, František mounted the podium. “Dear friends of Glorious October,” he said in perfect Russian. “We have a guest today the caliber of which we have not seen since that Bulgarian with the funny parrot last year . . . Yezdinsky, was it? Only thirty years old, but already thrice a Hero of Socialist Labor, not to mention the youngest person ever to receive the Order of Andropov for Heroic Operation of a Wheat Combine . . . Comrades, please welcome the General Secretary of the Central Presidium of the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists and a serious contender for Russia’s presidency in the next election . . . Comrade Yasha Oslov!”

  The geezers rose to their feet in an enormous polyester wave, cheering “Hurrah, Trotsky!” even though Vladimir’s alias had by now been established. Noticing his injuries, some of the grandmas were shouting: “What ails you, Trotsky? We’ll fix you up!”

  Vladimir waved to them solicitously as he climbed the stairs, nearly losing his fragile balance in the act. He set his briefcase full of greenbacks on top of the lectern and adjusted the microphone with his working hand, waiting for the applause to subside. “Stalwart comrades,” he shouted and immediately stopped. Stalwart comrades . . . Um, and then what? “First let me ask you, is it acceptable that I speak in Russian?”

  “But of course! Speak, Russian eagle!” the audience said as one.

  My kind of audience, Vladimir thought. He breathed in all his doubts once, felt the pain of breathing, then dispelled them into the air, thick with the smell of groceries going bad and cheap suits worn on a warm day. “Stalwart comrades!” he shouted into the silence. “Outside it is a warm April day, the sky is clear. But over the mausoleum of Vladimir Ilych,” he turned for emphasis to the statue of Lenin, “the sky is a perpetual gray!”

  “Woe, poor Lenin!” moaned the crowd. “Poor are his heirs.”

  “Poor, indeed,” Vladimir said. “Just look what has happened to your beautiful Red Prava. Americans everywhere you turn! (The crowd roared its opposition!) Performing lewd sexual acts on the Emanuel Bridge as if to laugh at the sanctity of the Socialist Family and to spread their AIDS! (Roar!) Shooting up their marijuana with dirty needles in the Old Town Square, where once a hundred thousand comrades thrilled to the words of Jan Zhopka, your first working-class president. (Roar! Roar!) Is this why for forty years you have toiled in the fields and melted all that metal . . . melted all that metal into steel, built those wonderful trams, a subway system that is the envy of the Paris Métro, public toilets everywhere . . . And let’s not forget the human element! How many faithful, energetic young comrades have we produced, like Comrade František here . . .”

  He waved to František in the front row and presented the crowd with both an upturned thumb and a victory sign (he wasn’t about to skimp on them). “Franti!” cheered the crowd.

  “Yes, Comrade Franti has been dispensing Red Justice since he was in diapers! Keep beating up that counter-revolutionary element with your mighty pen, dear friend!” Oh, he was starting to like this! He paced before the lectern like an agitated Bolshevik, even touching the cool marble of the Big Daddy of the Revolution for support. “Look at my hand!” he shouted, waving the bandaged package in the air with his other hand. “Look what they’ve done to it, the industrialists! I spoke my mind at a rally of Negro workers in Washington, and the CIA put it through a meat grinder!”

  At the mention of the meat grinder, a comrade in a frumpy mink and floral headscarf could no longer contain herself. She sprang to her feet and waved a segmented string of sausages around her head, lasso-style. “I paid forty crowns for these!” she shouted. “What do you think of that?”

  “Yes,” the crowd picked up the rallying cry. “What do you think of that?”

  “What do I think of that?” Vladimir pointed to himself as if he were surprised that they would solicit his opinion. “I think that the store owner responsible for charging forty crowns for those sausages should be shot!”

  The entire crowd was now on its feet; its ovation must have been heard over at the restaurant next door. “I think his family should be forced to leave Prava as enemies of the people,” shouted the incorrigible Vladimir, “and his children never allowed to attend university!” Hurrah! answered the crowd.

  “His cat should be turned into cat food!” Hurrah!

  “And what do you think of twenty crowns for a carp?” another inquisitive babushka wanted to know.

  “Disgrace! Why have we let the labor camps of Siberia go idle? And what about those nice Stolovan uranium mines? Comrades, when the Liberal Democratic Worker-
Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists takes control, these new entrepreneurs will really have their work cut out for them!”

  The crowd lapsed into cheerful laughter and applause, gold teeth sparkled across the room, and more than one hand reached to calm the overexcited beating of a faulty heart. “We will take care of them one by one, dear tovarishchii. We will strangle the life out of them with our own bare hands, those fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits!”

  Now, what can one say about coincidences? Either one believes in a higher power or one just shrugs. Looking back, Vladimir would concede that at that moment he was tempted to believe, for no sooner had the words “fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits” escaped his mouth, than the Groundhog parted the velvet curtain and burst into the room, trailed closely by Gusev and the Log. Yes, they all had on their Armani pinstripes and were looking more porcine than ever, although perhaps the power of suggestion played some part in that.

  “There they are!” shouted Vladimir, pointing, he thought, directly into the Groundhog’s solar plexus. “They’ve come to disrupt our dignified meeting! For the honor of the Fatherland, tear those pigs to shreds!”

  The Groundhog tilted his head and sucked in his cheeks in amazement, as if to say, “Et tu, Brute?” Then an enormous kielbasa landed on his head and the crowd charged.

  Vladimir did not witness all the weapons at their disposal, suffice to say crutches played a big part, but for him the most enduring scene of the melee, like war footage that gets played over and over again on the networks, was the sight of a plump matron in heels stabbing at Gusev’s heart with the business end of a sturgeon, shouting: “Is that hard enough for you, you crook?” while her confused victim pleaded for mercy.

  And so, as old soldiers heaved metal chairs against the intruders, and sausages circled overhead like Sikorsky choppers, František hurried Vladimir toward an alternate exit to the embankment. “Brilliant!” was the single word he said, as he pushed him out into the noon light and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Still full of revolutionary fervor, but now reminded of more pressing matters, Vladimir ran down the embankment chasing a departing taxi. “Halt, comrade!” he was shouting out of habit.

  The taxi squealed in compliance and Vladimir heaved himself inside with a crack of something internal. “Oh, for the love of God . . .” He sneezed, and two gushers of blood were released, one per nostril, the way one imagines a winning racehorse lets out fire at the finish line.

  The driver—a teenager by the looks of him, his shaved head tattooed with the anarchist’s goofy “A”—caught sight of this blood-bath in the rearview. “Out, out,” cried the anarchist driver. “No blood in auto! No HIV! Out!”

  A stack of a hundred hundred-dollar bills hit the back of the driver’s head (Vladimir had thrown it with such force that it left a momentary red trace on that great moony surface). The driver looked down at the stash. He threw the little Trabant into gear.

  The way to the airport required a quick U-turn, which a car any larger than a Trabant could not perform. In this respect, Vladimir was fortunate. In the respect that the U-turn took him straight into the Groundhog’s armada of BMWs and mafiyosi in retreat from the octogenarian Red Army, he was not.

  His driver pressed on the horn dutifully and cursed as well, but with all the confusion up ahead he could not help but hit a large object, which Vladimir to his dying day would believe was Log. However, considering the glare of the afternoon sun and the blinding red flashes exploding around his corneas, he could have been wrong. It could have been a friend of the Log.

  Nevertheless, the force of the impact steered the Trabant into the railing of the embankment. The Trabi, knowing a greater physical force when it crashed into one, bounced back into the street, saving Vladimir and his driver from a lapse into the river. A remarkable car, the Trabant! Such shyness and humility, such understated presence. Mother had always wanted Vladimir to marry a girl just like this Trabi.

  “Car is dead!” the driver moaned, even as they made exceptional progress up the embankment and onto the bridge that snaked off from Prospekt Narodna. “Pay me!” Flustered and at the teenager’s mercy, Vladimir hit him with another ten thou, in response to which the driver pulled a confetti of wires and a single lightbulb out of the dashboard. This immediately sent the Trabant into heat: with terrific gusto and a transparent lack of regard for traffic signals they bounded through the Lesser Quarter and around Repin Hill.

  A curtain of gray smoke rising from the Foot now blanketed the city, smoke as thick as the scalloped clouds one sees looking down from an airplane window. A premature night had descended upon Prava, coloring the spires and domes of the Old Town with an eerie industrial beauty.

  By this point, the pain in Vladimir’s ribs was becoming acute. He broke down in a fit of coughing. There was something in his throat, a thick string of coagulated blood, and he pulled at it, pulled until the whole food chain unwrapped itself from within his stomach and landed on the driver’s bald pate.

  For a second his cause seemed lost; for a second it looked like he would have to walk it to the airport. But all the driver said, in the meek, bewildered way of a proud local boy suddenly covered in a Westerner’s innards, was, “Pay me.” When the money fell alongside him, he gunned the engine once more.

  Looking down at the city below them, Vladimir could see the BMW caravan making its way up the hill, one car on the heels of the next, forming a dark-blue river not unlike the Tavlata, except flowing a great deal more energetically and up the slope of Repin Hill. Vladimir shuddered, amazed at the power of the organization to which he once belonged, although a chain of luxury German automobiles was perhaps its most potent manifestation. Unless, of course, every link in that chain was strafing you with gunfire.

  This happened a good ten minutes hence. The Trabant had quit the other side of Repin Hill and emerged onto the main highway leading out of the city. Vladimir was suffering from a dizzying attack of blood and tears. He was leaning his head back to keep the blood down and whispering to himself his father’s “no-tears” manifesto, when a bullet took out the back window of the Trabi. The tiny shards of glass drew fine red lines on the back of the driver’s head, complementing (rather befittingly) the tattooed “A,” symbol of the anarchists. “Ah!” shouted the driver. “Artillery is shooting to death car and Jaroslav! Pay me!”

  Vladimir crept down into the pool of his own blood. The driver, Jaroslav, swerved into a no-man’s land between the guardrails and the freeway proper. The thin Trabant squeezed past a trailer truck in front of them bearing the logo of a Swedish modular-furniture company.

  Shell-shocked, Vladimir crawled back up to look through the nonexistent window behind him. The Swedish furniture truck now separated their car from the Groundhog’s shooting party like some kind of ad hoc U.N. reaction force. But the Hog’s men apparently had no respect for Swedish furniture. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students, they continued to shoot as the truck swerved madly to stay on the road. Finally, their labors produced results—with an audible whoosh, the back doors of the truck blew away.

  A houseful of Krovnik dining tables in assorted colors, Skanör solid-beech glass-door cabinets, Arkitekt retractable work lamps (with adjustable heads), and the daddy of them all—a Grinda three-piece sofa ensemble in “modern paisley,” came sailing out of the back of the truck and onto the flotilla of BMWs to settle once and for all the Russo-Swedish War of 1709.

  THEY PULLED UP to the departure terminal. Vladimir, in a gesture of last-minute good will, threw another ten grand at Jaroslav, who slapped Vladimir’s sweat-soaked back, and, his own eyes now tearing, shouted: “Run, J.R.! One car still follows us!”

  He ran, absentmindedly wiping the blood off his nose onto the already bloodied hand bandage. He slapped his passport on the desk of the half-awake security team guarding the departure gate. At that formal moment, his briefcase, stuffed with a
bout fifty thousand dollars and a gun, came to mind. “Oh, pardon me,” said the ever-vigilant Vladimir. He hobbled over to the nearest trash can, sheepishly took out the gun, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, deposited that useless item within. “Don’t even ask about the gun,” he said to the nice, walrus-mustached gentlemen in dark green. “What a long day!”

  “American?” said the security commandant, a tall individual, fit and lean, a shock of white hair beneath his beret. It was more of a statement than a question. With a minimum of malice, he told Vladimir to keep his blood-soaked hands off the spotless white counter, then stamped a childish picture of a departing plane into the passport and waved Vladimir through the gate. With ten minutes until departure, Vladimir prepared for a final sprint.

  Directly behind him, Gusev and the Groundhog were running up to the security counter, buttoning up their double-breasters, straightening their ties, and shouting in Russian: “Stop the criminal in the bloodied shirt! The little criminal, stop him!”

  Vladimir stopped, as if frozen by these hurtful words, but the security detail hardly turned around. “We don’t speak Russian here,” the commandant announced in Stolovan as the others laughed approval.

  “Stop the international terrorist!” Gusev was hollering, still in the wrong tongue.

  “Passport!” the chief hollered back at them in the international language of border police about to get more than a little surly.