Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story

Pointing to FoxLiberty-Ultra, my father asked me: “Is it true they are letting gomiki marry in New York?”

My mother quickly darted out of the kitchen, a plate of beet salad in hand. “What? What did you say? They are letting gomiki marry now?”

“Go back to the kitchen, Galya!” my father shouted with a measure of his usual depressed vitality. “I am talking to my son!” I confessed that I did not know what was happening in my hometown, nuptial-wise, and that we really had other things to worry about, but my father wanted to share more of his opinions on the matter. “Mr. Vida,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his Indian neighbor, “believes that gomiki are the most disgusting creatures in the world and should be castrated and shot. But I don’t know. They say, naprimer [‘for example’], that the famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky was a gomik . That on soblaznil [‘he corrupted’] little boys, even the Tsar’s own son! And that when he died it was the Tsar who had pressured him to make suicide. Maybe this is true, maybe it is not.” My father sighed and brought one hand to his face. His tired brown eyes were marked with a sadness I had seen only once before-at my grandmother’s funeral, when he had emitted a howl of such unknown, animalistic provenance, we thought it had come from the forest abutting the Jewish cemetery. “But for me,” he said, breathing heavily, “it doesn’t matter. You see, for a genius like Tchaikovsky I could forgive anything, anything !”

My father’s arm was still around me, holding me in place, making me his. I no longer had any idea what he was talking about. A bewildered part of me wanted to say, “Papa, there’s an armored jeep guarding the 99¢ store on Old Country Road and you’re talking about gomiki ?” But I kept quiet. Whom would it help if I spoke? I felt the sorrow that flowed in all directions in this house, sorrow for him, for them, for the three of us-Mama, Papa, Lenny. “Tchaikovsky,” my father said, each heavy syllable eliciting an unquantifiable pain in his deep baritone voice. He raised his hand in the air and silently directed a movement, from the depressive Sixth Symphony perhaps. “Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,” my father said, lost in reverence for the homosexual composer. “He has brought me so much joy.”

By the time my mother called me down to dinner-after I had taken a breather upstairs and noticed the replacement of my father’s essay on “The Joys of Playing Basketball” with a gleaming poster of the Israeli fortress of Masada-I was nearly in tears myself. The dinner table would usually be covered lengthwise with meats and fish, but today it was nearly empty-just beet salad, tomatoes and peppers from the garden, a plate of marinated mushrooms, and some slices of a suspiciously white bread.

My mother noticed my chagrin. “There is a deficit at the Waldbaum’s, and anyway we are afraid of the Credit Poles,” she said. “What if they are still on? What if they try to deport us? Sometimes Mr. Vida takes us in the truck, but otherwise it is very hard to find food.”

And then a different kind of truth appealed to me, reminded me of how self-involved I was, how residually angry I had remained at the Abramovs and their difficult household. The transparency I had noticed in my parents earlier, the way they had melded into each other-it was simply a matter of looking closely at their bodies and their stunted movements.

My parents were starving.

I walked into the kitchen and checked the nearly bare pantry-potatoes from the back garden, canned peppers, marinated mushrooms, four sliced pieces of moldy white bread, two rusted tins of some kind of Bulgarian cod-in-a-can. “This is terrible,” I said to them. “We have the jeeps here. Let me at least take you to Waldbaum’s.”

“No, no,” they shouted in unison.

“Sit down,” my father said. “There’s beet salad. There’s bread and mushrooms. You have brought Tagamet. What more do we need? We’re old people. Soon we will die and be forgotten.”

They knew exactly what to say. I had been kicked in the stomach, or so it seemed, for I was now clutching my relatively full belly, and every brand of concern coursed through my digestive tract.

“We’re going to the Waldbaum’s,” I said. I raised my hand in preparation for their weak protests. The decisive son speaks. “We’re not going to discuss this. You need food.”

We crammed into one jeep, the other serving as a lead escort, Palatino’s men flashing their weapons at a gang of miscreants crowded around what used to be the Friendly’s restaurant but was now apparently the headquarters of some local militia. Was this what Russia looked like after the Soviet Union collapsed? I tried, unsuccessfully, to see the country around me not just through my father’s eyes but through his history . I wanted to be a part of a meaningful cycle with him, a cycle other than birth and death.

While my mother carefully wrote out a list of supplies they needed, my father told me about a recent dream he had had. A few of the “Chinese swine” engineers at the laboratory where he used to work accuse him of releasing radiation into the air during his morning custodial rounds, he is about to be arrested, but in the end he is vindicated when two Russian women janitors show up from Vladivostok and pin the radiation leak on some Indians. “When I wake up, my lip is bleeding from fear,” my father said, his gray head still trembling from the memory.

“They say that dreams often have secret meanings,” I said.

“I know, I know,” he said, waving his hand in the air dismissively. “Psychology.”

I patted my father’s knee, wanting to impart comfort. He was wearing denims, old Reebok sneakers that I had bequeathed him, an Ocean Pacific T-shirt with a fading iron-on of some young southern-Californian surfers showing off their boogie boards (also from the Lenny Abramov teenage collection), along with plastic sunglasses covered by what looked like an oil slick. He was, in his own way, magnificent. The last American standing.

We pulled into the strip mall where the Waldbaum’s supermarket huddled next to a boarded-up nail salon and a former sushi place which now sold “WATER FROM CLEAN PLACE, 1 GALLON = 4 YUAN, BRING YOUR OWN CAN.” As the jeep pulled up directly to the Waldbaum’s door, my parents looked at me with great pride-here I was taking care of them, honoring them, a good son at last. I refrained from throwing myself around their necks in gratitude. Look at the happy family!

Inside the brown-and-cream-colored supermarket, the lights had been turned down to create an even sadder shopping environment than I had known in the heyday of Waldbaum’s, although Enya was still being piped through the sound system, warbling about the flow of the Orinoco and the cruelly phrased possibility of sailing away. I was also struck by a row of ancient photographs showing the walleyed, balding produce and deli managers of years past, a Westbury combination of striving Southeast Asians and Hispanics, under the fascistic slogan “If it’s good for you, it’s good for Waldbaum’s.”

My father took me to see the empty shelf where the Tagamet pills used to be stocked. “ Pozorno ” (“It is shameful”), he said. “No one care about the sick or the old anymore.”

My mother was standing in the baked-goods aisle, next to an old Italian woman, deep into an angry monologue about the Mix-n-Match butter-pound-cake and angel-food-cake combo, which was priced at an exorbitant eighteen yuan. “Let’s get the cakes, Mama,” I said, mindful of my mother’s sweet tooth. “I’m paying for everything.”

“No, Lyonitchka,” she said. “You have to save for your own future. And for Eunice’s, don’t forget. At least let’s look for the red-dot special.”