Gary Shteyngart - Little Failure

The Russian card game is called Durak, or The Fool. The object is to get rid of all of one’s cards, lest one be labeled The Fool. In this photo, my father’s hand is stronger than mine.

THE NEXT YEAR I get the present every boy wants. A circumcision.

At Solomon Schechter I have been given an appropriately sacrificial Hebrew name: Yitzhak, or Isaac. And so the knife is drawn at Coney Island Hospital, Orthodox men davening out a blessing in the adjoining room, a sedation mask placed over my mouth (perfect for an asthmatic boy with an anxiety disorder), and then the public hospital walls — green on green on green on green — disappear to be replaced by a dream where the horrible things lovingly perpetrated upon Emmanuelle in a Hong Kong brothel are done to me by the men in black hats.

And then the pain.

Mama, Papa, where are you?

And then the layers of pain.

Mama, Papa, help .

And then the layers of pain and humiliation.

My mother has cut a hole in my underwear so that my broken penis will not have to touch polyester. I have been transferred from my army cot to my parents’ bed. I lie there with my ruined genital exposed to the outside world, and shockingly enough people come to visit, all of my relatives come to see the awful thing I have between my legs. “ Nu , how do you feel?” they ask wolfishly.

“Bol’no,” I say. It hurts.

“ Zato evreichik! ” they cry in approval. But you’re a little Jew now!

I cover up with the book I have at my side, All Rome , making a little tent over myself. What I’ve been staring at since coming home from the hospital is one of Pietro da Cortona’s oils, Rape of the Sabine Women . The women are not being raped in the contemporary sense, of course, but rather being abducted by the first generation of Roman men, their little children weeping at their feet, parts of their breasts exposed à la Emmanuelle in Hong Kong . And these men in their tunics and their helmets, they are as strong and swarthy as my father. And I am as pale and helpless as—

I’m not suggesting what I seem to be suggesting here. Only that it has all come full circle to this. The Stinky Russian Bear, the second most hated boy in first and soon to be second grade of Hebrew school (I’ll get to the most hated boy shortly), is lying, his crotch exposed, in his parents’ bed with what feels like razor blades cutting through his penis, over and over again. (It goes without saying that the procedure at the public hospital did not go well.) There will be creatures in horror movies in my near future, the softshell crabs of Ridley Scott’s Alien the most visually accomplished ones, but this baroque chiaroscuro of dried blood and thread will never find equal. And, to this day, whenever I see a naked blade, I shudder because I know what it can do to a boy of eight.

We’ve all done what we’ve had to since coming here. My mother has slaved in an overheated watch factory in Queens, my father has studied English and the other languages of the day, COBOL and Fortran, painstakingly. Our apartment is littered with IBM punch cards from my father’s computer classes, which I handle with the same awe as I do the free Honeycomb license plates, intrigued as much by their crisp, beige, American feel as by the words and phrases my father has written upon them, English on one side, Russian on the other. I remember, for some reason, the following words: “industry” ( promyshlennost’ ), “teapot” ( chainik ), “heart attack” ( infarkt ), “symbolism” ( simvolizm ), “mortgage” ( zaklad ), and “ranch” ( rancho ).

Still, we didn’t come to this country just to one day get a zaklad for our rancho , did we? It wasn’t all about the money. We came to be Jews, right? Or at least my father did. I didn’t really have any feeling on the subject one way or another. And now there has to be simvolizm . And that’s why I’ve been cut so brutally, to be more like the children who hate me so much at school, who hate me more than I will ever be hated for the rest of my life. They hate me because I come from the country our new president will soon declare to be the “Evil Empire,” giving rise to the endless category of movies beginning with the word “Red”— Red Dawn, Red Gerbil, Red Hamster . “Commie!” they shout, with a jolly push into a soft Hebrew school wall. “Russki!”

But I got cut down there for you! I want to shout back at them. I left Latin Lenin in Moscow Square just to get this circumcision. I’m a Jew like you, and doesn’t that matter more than where I was born? Why won’t you share a sticky Fruit Roll-Up with me?

It is hard to question the choices my parents made during the long and strange days of immigration, and I think they mostly did all right given the circumstances. But allow me to travel up to the ceiling of our Kew Gardens one-bedroom, the way I frequently did during asthma attacks when I felt myself lifted out of my deoxygenated body, allow me to look down at the boy with his little toy, Chewie from Star Wars missing his right arm, and then his other little toy, the one so broken and deformed that for two years every act of urination has to be done through gritted teeth, the one framed by a genital-sized hole in his underwear, and allow me to ask the pertinent question: What the fuck?

And I know the answer, the fairly reasonable one, that my parents have to questions of this caliber: “But we didn’t know.”

Or, a more pathetic refugee one attributed to my mother: “We were told to do it.”

Or a less reasonable one, the one I would attribute to my father: “But you have to be a man.”

And now Yona Metzger, chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel: “It is a stamp, a seal on the body of a Jew.”

In school, my penis is trying to put on a brave face. It can’t tell anyone what happened or they’ll make fun of its owner, Igor, or Gary, or whatever. But if they push The Refugee Formerly Known as Igor penis-first into the wall on the line to the lunchroom, well … ouch .

I’m trying to put a brave face on myself, too. I begin to write out my first lies in the new language.

GARY SHTEYNGART SSS [SOLOMON SCHECHTER SCHOOL]

April 31 [sadly, there are only thirty days in April], 1981 Class 2C

ESSAY: SPRING

Spring is here The weather is warm an rainy Birds come From south and sing songs In spring I play soccer baseball with my friends [lie] I ride my bike [the asthma is returning from all the stress, so mostly I don’t] happy spring And I go fishing [with my father, who gets very upset if I don’t bait the hook right] I like spring [relatively speaking] I hate winter [because I am even sicker than in spring].

Games in spring that I play baseball [lie, a drawing of me hitting a ball with what looks like a chain saw] bike [drawing of me and what looks like my circumcised penis, a swollen third leg, on top of a bicycle] friesbee [sic, lie, a drawing of me throwing a Frisbee at a boy’s neck], soccer [lie, in another drawing, a boy is shouting at me, “Don’t throw it to ( sic ) high,” and I am shouting back, “Why I listen should?”]

Oh, who is this sportsman, I ask you? This tough-talking soccer-baseball-Frisbee hero with the tons of friends, whose every response borders on the insouciant: Why I listen should? Left behind by a year, he’s still not mastering any English, that’s for sure. Putting together a report on his beloved Italy, he describes the Colosseum fairly concisely as Had roof not any more . Summoned down to the office of the principal: “I do samsing bad?” “No, sweetheart,” the dear secretaries say, “no, asheine punim ,” “nice face” in Yiddish. They present me with bags from places called Gimbels and Macy’s, filled with batches of their children’s old clothes, more T-shirt appearances by the man who turns into a bat and his masked young slave, the Boy Wonder. Upstairs, back in class, with the sacks of clothes at my feet, the kids whisper at me.