Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“To stand around is pointless!” shouted Kostya, negating centuries of Russian peasant wisdom, and then began to run like a madman around the sandy path. “Onward! Onward!”

Vladimir lamely broke into a trot. There was something one had to do with the arms; he looked to Kostya who was raising dust across the field and tried to purposefully strike the air, left, right, left, right. Christ. Perhaps he should have finished college just to avoid this madness. But then college graduates were often conscripted to play racquetball in Wall Street gyms. Although there was always social work… for quiet people who liked the shade.

He went around, three years added to his life per every lap completed. He grasped for the thin Stolovan air. He felt sweat as thick as shampoo separating his skin-’n’-rib body from his flimsy cotton tee. He felt globs of mucus coagulate in his defective lungs while he hobbled from one foot to the next like one of those awkward Floridian birds.

Kostya slowed down to keep pace with him. “So? Do you feel it?”

“D… Da,” Vladimir affirmed.

“You feeling good?”

“D… Da.”

“Better than ever?”

Vladimir cringed and waved his arms to indicate his inability to talk. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” hollered his tormentor. “Now, which Greek said that?”

Vladimir shrugged. Zorba? Couldn’t be. “Socrates, I think,” shouted Kostya. He sped ahead of Vladimir as if to show him how it could be done. Soon he disappeared completely. Vladimir panted. His eyes were clouded over with tears, his pulse was going faster than the Fan Man’s fan set to HIGH. Then the sandy path disappeared also. It got dark, maybe there was a cloud overhead. There was the crunch of grass and twigs. There was a shout of “Hey.” He hit something hard with his head.

VLADIMIR’S THROAT PASSEDa ball of phlegm the size of a frog. He looked at it lying next to him in the grass. Kostya was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “So you ran into a tree,” he said. “No big deal. The tree’s all right. You just got a dash of blood here. We have American Band-Aids in the house. Gusev’s men go through them like vodka.”

Vladimir blinked a couple of times then tried to flip himself over. This resting-under-a-tree part was nice, much better than running around in the sun. Did he feel stupid? Not at all—varsity sports weren’t on his résumé. Maybe now the idiot Kostya would leave him alone to his asthma and his alcohol. “Okay, so we’ll start out slow next time,” Kostya said. “I see we have some limitations.”

We? Vladimir tried to beam disgust into the madman’s face, but it was too busy looking all sweet and puffy, while the hands carefully worked his wound as if Vladimir were Kostya’s best buddy brought down at Stalingrad. Vladimir pictured this scene on a recruiting poster entitled: “You’re in the mafiya now!”

“Right,” Vladimir said. “Start out slow next time. Maybe we’ll do some…” He could think of no Russian equivalent to power-walking. “We’ll lift some light weights or something.”

“I got those,” Kostya said. “Light and heavy, however you like them. But my guess is you need to develop your cardiovascular system.”

“No, I think I need to lift some very light weights,” Vladimir said, but there was no arguing with Kostya. They would run slowly around the track while bearing light weights every noon on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. “The other days I’m in church,” explained Kostya.

“Of course you are,” Vladimir said, staring blankly at his own blood flowing dark and somber against the outrageous pinks and violets of Kostya’s jumpsuit. Fuck him. But he had one thought: “Isn’t church only on Sunday?”

“I help out in the mornings on Wednesday and Friday,” explained the cherub. “They have a very small Russian Orthodox community here and they really need a lot of help. My family, you see, has very strong religious roots going back to before the revolution. We’ve had priests, deacons, monks…”

“Oh, my grandfather was a deacon,” said the absentminded Vladimir.

And that was how he got himself invited to church.

ON THE AMERICANfront, things were moving. When the afternoons of loafing around the compound, pretending to develop a business strategy and learn the local language exhausted themselves, Vladimir, along with Jan, the youngest, least mustached of all the Stolovan drivers, flew past the castle down to the golden city. The BMW assigned to him, Vladimir learned, was not of the top class such as the ones requisitioned by Gusev and some of his direct subordinates and, of course, the Groundhog who had two Beamers, one with a fixed roof, the other a convertible. Vladimir learned a lot about cars from Jan, on whom he would also practice his Stolovan. While his new friend derailed trams and scared the living crap out of dachshunds and babushka s alike, Vladimir learned to say: “This car is bad. There’s no five-disc CD changer.” And, alternatively: “You have a face that is attractive to me. Come inside my nice car.”

His web expanded from Eudora Welty’s and the Nouveau to the Air Raid Shelter, the Boom Boom Room, Jim’s Bar, and even, after one mistaken foray, Club Man. There were whispers:

“That’s the publisher, the new one.”

“He’s the talent scout. For that multinational. PravaInvest.”

“The novelist, you must have heard of him… Sure, he’s published all over the place.”

“I’ve seen him with Alexandra! She asked me to light her cigarette at the Nouveau once…”

“We should buy him a Unesko.”

“My God, he’s sneering our way.”

In the course of it all, Vladimir had developed a solid, workmanlike crush on Alexandra. He looked all over her undeniably accomplished body, whenever her eyes scanned the menu, the beer list, the wine list, or were somehow otherwise engaged, then brought the little slips of memory back to his panelak where by night they fueled his dreams, by day provided contemplation: her lips, soft and maraschino-red against the gray-brick backdrop of the Old Town Hall; breast seen from above, overhanging a square marble table; long tanned arms reaching out constantly to embrace some local celebrity, press him into her signature raised clavicle. It was nothing heavy, like it had been with Francesca. Just a refreshingly honest (albeit pathetic) and sexually-affirming thing to do, and he went about doing it methodically. He asked her to lunch, but to allay any suspicion of his romantic intentions he had to ask all of them in turn, and frequently Marcus accompanied her. These were business lunches where nothing got accomplished, ideas for the magazine were pushed around like mah-jongg tiles, but ultimately it was the gossip and who-bedded-who crap that was published breathlessly in the sweet and smoky café air. Alexandra, sadly, bedded only Marcus, the rugby runt, who Vladimir learned was an asshole par excellence, but one that nipped and tugged at his own ass daily for the coveted spot of editor-in-chief.

“Oi, these fucks,” Marcus would say in a Cockney adopted from years of being physically big and artistically small in London’s West End, as he scanned the sourpussed patrons of the café/bar/disco/restaurant. “The next Hemingway they think they are.” And there was Marcus’s problem: he didn’t write. He acted, and, in an effort to bridge the gap between what he could do and what Prava wanted him to do, he had taken up painting and what Alexandra hopefully termed “the graphic arts.” Vladimir figured he’d slot him in for art editor, which would theoretically mean that Marcus would “edit” however many of his own pieces he wished, stick them into the damn thing, and call it a day.