Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that, ” said the emboldened Vladimir. “Yes, we shall see.”

Alexandra was tugging on his ear, anxious to give him a census of the place. “Look at the backpackers! Look how big they are! Oh, that frat-hog with the Ohio State T-shirt! Oh, he’s priceless!”

“What’s their function?” Vladimir said.

“None,” Cohen said, wiping beer off his chin. “They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushka s like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus.”

“And where are our people?” Vladimir shouted to Alexandra above the din.

She pointed around to the back tables, which, Vladimir now realized, were reserved for their fellow artists, slopping beer calmly amid the suburban feeding-frenzy.

An ambassador from one of those tables, a tall young buck in a Warhol T-shirt, brought a sleek blue water pipe filled with hashish. Vladimir was now introduced as “magnate, talent scout, poet laureate, and publisher.” They smoked the sweet and peppery hash, refilling the pipe enough times for their fingers to become brown and sticky, for this was the moist and lethal kind of hash that could only result from Turkey’s proximity. The fellow offered it to Vladimir for six hundred crowns a gram, but Vladimir was too tweaked to deal with both crowns and the metric system. He bought two thousand dollars’ worth anyway and made another lifelong friend in the process.

There was little he would remember after the hashish entered the picture. There was the dancing with Maxine and Alexandra and possibly the boys. A wide swath of floor was cleared of backpackers by brown-shirted disco personnel, and Vladimir’s crowd was invited to get up and boogie. At this point a serious fracas broke out. A sorority sister crying foul jumped on Vladimir, of all people. Stoned beyond capacity, Vladimir thought he was being romanced, what with all that sweet-smelling American flesh around him and a pair of manicured claws dug into his sides. Only when Alexandra started to drag the sister off by the hair did Vladimir realize that he was at the center of some kind of class antagonism.

She did this hair-pulling with aplomb and Vladimir, free of his burden, must have thanked her profusely because he remembered her saying “Aww” in the purple-gray-green haze of disco lights and hash smoke, and kissing him on both cheeks. Then he felt good about the whole clumsy incident since it had further polarized the crowd into “us” versus “them” and in the space of one short evening he had placed himself squarely in the “us” column of the register.

Then, sometime during the taxi ride up to his compound, he remembered poking the dozing Cohen and trying to point out the city below, its floodlights put out, but the yellow moon still traveling along the bend of the Tavlata, the airplane warning lights blinking off the cuff of the Foot, a lone Fiat huffing its way past the silent embankment. “Perry, look at how beautiful,” Vladimir said.

“Yes, good,” said Cohen and fell back asleep.

Finally, he was looking up at the walls of his panelak castle, remembering how imposing Casa Girshkin had seemed during the high school days of returning from Manhattan late at night, intoxicated, incoherent, and unresponsive to his ever-vigilant mother’s queries in both Russian and English. He walked into the lobby where Gusev’s men had fallen asleep, some with their playing cards still in their hands. Empowered by the smell of the lobby, he crawled upstairs in search of his bed, missing his floor twice. At last he found his room, then his bed.

She was a pretty one—Alexandra, he thought, before sprinkling himself with minoxidil and quietly passing out.

NOBODY WOKE HIMup. Ever. Not only had Vladmir forgotten to pack his alarm clock but the Groundhog and the human tentacles of his vast apparatus were apparently still nice and cozy in bed with their girlfriends and rifles till well into the afternoon. Kostya, it turned out, spent his mornings in church.

Vladimir found out this ecclesiastical tidbit on his fifth Prava day. He woke up late to what might have been an explosion at one of the Paleolithic-era factories lying low against the velvet horizon, but it could have very well been an explosion within Vladimir himself—last evening’s pivo and vodka and schnapps had arranged themselves as unfortunate bedmates in his stomach and Vladimir was forced to heave all over the sterility of his prefab bathroom, the lecherous peacock grinning knowingly from the shower curtain. Vladimir noticed the fowl had on a tight pair of boxer shorts in the hues of the Stolovan tricolor and had an avian bulge to boot.

The previous night, the third installment of the Café Nouveau saga, had left Vladimir gripping for the side of his body where he imagined his liver lived out its troubled existence, and so he put on a New York Sports Club T-shirt (they had canvassed the Emma Lazarus Society for membership—as if anyone had the money!) with the vain hope that he could be made fit by the power of suggestion. He walked down to the empty Kasino, hoping Marusya, the perpetually drunk old lady behind the counter, was dispensing cigarettes and her special hangover brew. She was not.

Kostya, however, was there, wearing a jogging suit fluorescent enough to put the peacock to shame, and a heavy gold chain with cross and anatomically correct Jesus weighing down nearly to his stomach. “Vladimir! What a beautiful day! Have you been outside?”

“Have you seen Marusya?”

“You don’t need her on a day like today,” Kostya said, tugging at his Christ. “Give your lungs a break, I say.” He looked closely at Vladimir’s T-shirt, until it appeared to Vladimir that his scrawny self was under examination and he hunched forward his shoulders in defense. “Sports club,” read Kostya out of sequence. “New York.”

“It was a gift.”

“No, you’re very lean, you must jog.”

“I’m just naturally a very healthy man.”

“Come with me,” Kostya said. “There’s space behind the houses. We’ll jog. You’ll build lower-body strength.”

Lower body? Meaning what—below his mouth? What kind of talk was this? Of course, his Chicagoan girlfriend back in the Midwestern college had made him run around a very sophisticated, computer-monitored field—their school’s concession to its athletic fringe-element. “You’ll thank me for this someday,” his former girlfriend used to say. Aha. Thank you, darling. Thank you for the gift of pain and sweat.

But then Kostya placed one of his beautiful paws, fingernails carefully trimmed, on Vladimir’s shoulder and led him out like a rebellious cow that had taken too much to the dank, moldy confines of her barn, into the hazy sunshine and sickly grass of early-autumn Prava.

Here it was very dacha- like: weeping willows wept under the weight of the tetra-hydro-petra-carbo whatever-the-hell-it-was being belched out of the smokestacks; postcommunist rabbits bounced about lethargically as if fulfilling some demented party directive nobody had bothered to rescind; and Kostya beamed like a farmer glad to be back after selling grain in the city. He unzipped his jogging suit to reveal a chest bereft of hair, and said things like “oooh,” “bozhe moi,” and “we’re in God’s country now.”

There was a clearing. An oval path of sand had been splashed about, probably by the jogging enthusiast himself, and the sun, free of the willows, burnt down upon the scene mercilessly. If there is a hell on this earth… thought Vladimir to himself, covering his burning head with his palm in an effort to prevent the minoxidil from burning off, if such a thing was possible. Now what?