Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“I’m glad we had this talk,” he said. “I think it’s time for me to go home now.” He walked over to the largest oak door in Scarsdale, New York, beheld its lucent door knob carved from Bohemian crystal, which he had always been too scared to smudge when he was a teenager; come to think of it, was scared still.

“Bye-bye,” he said in English.

There was no answer. He turned around to take one last look. Mother was staring at his feet. “Dosvedanya,” Vladimir said.

Mother continued to appraise his feet. “I’m leaving,” Vladimir announced. “I’m going to go kiss Grandmother good-bye, then catch the 4:51 train.” The thought of this train cheered him immediately. Express train to Manhattan now departing Scarsdale station. All aboard!

He was almost out of the woods. He was turning the knob, smudging the Bohemian crystal with all five fingers and a soft, sooty palm, when Mother issued a directive: “Vladimir, walk over to the window,” she said.

“What’s there?”

“Quickly, please. Without your father’s trademark hesitation.”

Vladimir did as he was told. He looked out the window. “What am I looking for?” he asked. “Grandma’s by the oak trees again. She’s throwing branches at the Indian.”

“Forget your grandma, Vladimir. Walk back to the door. Just as I said, back to the door… Left foot, then the right foot… Now stop. Turn around. Back to the window once again. Walk naturally, the way you usually walk. Don’t try to control your feet, let them fall where they may…” She paused. She cocked her head to one side. She got down on one knee and looked at his feet from a new angle. She got up slowly, wordlessly sizing up her son.

“So it is true,” she said in a voice of complete exhaustion, a voice Vladimir remembered from their early American days, when she would run home from her English and typing lessons to make him his favorite Salad Olivier—potatoes, canned peas, pickles, and diced ham tossed with a half-jar of mayonnaise. Sometimes she’d fall asleep at the table of their tiny Queens flat, a long knife in one hand, an English-Russian dictionary in the other, a row of pickles lined up on the chopping block, their fate uncertain.

“What do you mean?” Vladimir said presently. “What is true?”

“Vladimir, how can I say this? Please don’t be cross with me. I know you’ll be cross with me, you’re such a soft young man. But if I don’t tell you the truth, will I be fulfilling my motherly duties? No, I will not. The truth then…” She sighed deeply, an alarming sigh, the sigh of exhaling the last doubt, the sigh of preparing for battle. “Vladimir,” she said, “you walk like a Jew.”

“What?”

“ What? The anger in his voice. What? he says. What? Walk back to the window now. Just walk back to the window. Look at your feet. Look carefully. Look at how your feet are spread apart. Look at how you walk from side to side. Like an old Jew from the shtetl. Little Rebbe Girshkin. Oh, now he’s going to scream at me! Or maybe he’s going to cry. Either way, he’s going to hurt his mother. That’s how he repays his lifelong debt to her, by tearing her to shreds like a wolf.

“Oh, poor, poor Challah. Do you know how sorry I feel for your girlfriend, Vladimir… Think about it, how can a man love a woman when he despises his own mother? It can’t be done. And how can a woman love a man who walks like a Jew? I honestly don’t see what keeps you two together.”

“I think many people walk the way I do,” Vladimir whispered.

“Maybe in Amatevka,” Mother said. “In the Vilnius ghetto, maybe. You know, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person. Come here! No? He’s shaking his head like a little three-year-old… You don’t want to? Well, just stand there like an idiot, then!”

Vladimir was looking at her drawn and tired face, a residue of anger still pulsing along the upper lip. She was waiting for him, her patience ebbing, a slender laptop perched by the bedside urgently bleating for her attention. He wanted to comfort her. What could he do?

Perhaps, he resolved, perhaps he could improvise his own kind of love for his mother, cobbled together from past memories of an earlier mother—a harassed Leningrad kindergarten teacher and her love for her half-dead boy, the Soviet patriot, the best friend of Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe, the ten-year-old Chekhovian.

He could take her twice-a-day phone calls, pretend to listen dutifully to her screams and sobs, while holding the receiver several centimeters away from his face as if the telephone itself could explode.

He could lie to her, tell her he would do better, because even the invention of the lie meant he knew what was expected of him, knew that he was failing her.

And, undoubtedly, he could do one other thing for her.

It would be the least he could do…

VLADIMIR WALKED OVERto his mother, his feet a pair of Hebraic automatons steadily crossing the crisp parquet, wishing that he could Jew-walk his way back to Manhattan.

“Show me how it’s done,” Vladimir said.

Mother kissed both his cheeks and rubbed his shoulders, poking with her index finger at his spine. “Straighten up, sinotchek, ” she said. My little son. He had been out of her good graces too long: that one word made him wheeze with pleasure. “My treasure,” she added, knowing he would belong to her for the rest of the day, never mind the 4:51 train to Manhattan. “I’ll teach you how it’s done. You’ll walk like me, an elegant walk, everyone knows who they’re dealing with when I walk into a room. Straighten up. I’ll teach you…”

And she taught him. He took his first baby steps to her delight. It was all in the posture. You, too, could walk like a gentile. You had to keep your chin in the air. The spine straight.

Then the feet would follow.

SEVEN YEARS AFTERgraduating from an elite math-and-science high school along with his best friend Vladimir Girshkin, Baobab Gilletti looked very much the same. He was a pale redhead of admirable physique, although the demise of a teenager’s metabolism had left him with a new coat of fat, which he constantly tugged at, not without a sense of pride.

Tonight, having returned pink and glowing from his Miami narco-adventures, Baobab was educating Vladimir about his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Roberta. How she was so young and promising. How she wrote avant-garde film scripts and acted in and around them. How she was doing something.

The boys were sitting on a broken mohair couch in the living room of Baobab’s Yorkville tenement, watching little Roberta squirm into a tight pair of jeans, her bare legs as veined as a newborn’s, her mouth full of braces and Wild Bordeaux lipstick. It was too much adolescence for Vladimir, who tried to look away, but Roberta waddled up to him anyway, her jeans around her ankles, and shouted, “Vlad!” kissing his ear and deafening him with her pucker.

Baobab examined his girlfriend’s salaciousness through an empty brandy snifter. “Hey, what’s with the jeans?” he said to her. “You’re going out? But I thought…”

“You thought?” Roberta said. “Oh, you must tell me all about it, Liebschen! ” She rubbed Vladimir’s grizzly cheek with her own, watching with pleasure as the young man giggled and tried, unconvincingly, to push her away.

“I thought you were staying home tonight,” said Baobab. “I thought you were writing a critique of me or a response to my critique.”