Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“I know,” Vladimir said. “My mama told me.”

“Your mama’s very nice,” Lionya confessed shyly. “She’s the only one that makes sure they don’t hit me. She says we’re going to be best friends.”

A few hours later, lying on a mat during rest time, Vladimir embraced the tiny curled-up creature beside him, his first best buddy, just as Mother had promised. Maybe tomorrow they could go to the Piskaryovka mass grave together with their grandmothers and lay flowers for their dead. Maybe they would even be inducted into the Red Pioneers side by side. What good fortune that he and Lionya were so alike and that neither of them had siblings… Now they would have each other! It was as if Mother had created someone just for him, as if she had guessed how lonely he had been in his sick bed with his stuffed giraffe, the months spinning away in twilight gloom until it was June again, time to go down to sunny Yalta to watch the Black Sea dolphins jump for joy.

Wheezing along with his new pal, Vladimir hardly noticed that Mother had slipped into the room and was leaning over their prone bodies. “Ah, druzhki, ” she whispered to them, a word meaning, roughly, “little friends,” a word Vladimir to this day considered one of the most tender of his youth. “Has anyone assaulted you yet?” she asked them.

“No one has touched us,” they whispered back.

“Good… Then get some rest,” she said, pretending they were battle-hardened comrades returning from the front. She gave them each a Little Red Riding Hood chocolate candy, as tasty a candy as one could hope for, and rolled them into a blanket. “I like your mama’s hair, the way it’s so black you can almost see yourself in it,” Lionya said thoughtfully.

“She is beautiful,” Vladimir agreed. His mouth coated with chocolate, he went to sleep and dreamt that the three of them—Mother, Lionya, and he—were hiding along with Lenin in his horse-tail tent. It was cramped. There wasn’t much room for bravery or anything else. All they could do was huddle together and await an uncertain future. To pass the time, they took turns braiding Mother’s lustrous hair, making sure it framed her delicate temples just so. Even V. I. Lenin had to admit to his young friends that “it is always a great honor to braid the hair of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin of Leningrad.”

BACK IN HISprava panelak, Vladimir got up from his bed. He tried walking the way Mother had shown him a few months ago in Westchester. He straightened his posture until his back hurt. He put his feet together gentile-style, nearly scuffing his shiny new loafers, a parting gift from SoHo. But in the end he found the whole exercise pointless. If he could survive Soviet kindergarten hobbling Jewishly from humiliation to humiliation, then surely he could survive the scrutiny of some Midwestern clown named Plank.

And yet, even at a distance of half the globe, he could still feel Mother’s fingers poking his spine, her eyes moistening, the lyrical hysteria well on its way… How she had loved him once! How she had doted on her only child! How she had set an absolute standard for herself: I will do anything in the world for him, throw myself in front of the likes of Seryozha Klimov, enlist five-year-old playmates to his cause, leave my dying mother behind to emigrate to the States, force my ne’er-do-well husband into a life of illicit profit, just to make sure little Vladimir continues to breathe each shallow breath in safety and comfort.

How does one person sign over an entire lifetime to another? Selfish Vladimir could hardly begin to imagine it. And yet generations of Jewish-Russian women had done the same for their sons. Vladimir was part of a grand tradition of ultimate sacrifice and unbounded insanity. Only he had somehow managed to break free of this filial bondage and now found himself motherless and alone, punished and chastened.

What do I do now? Vladimir asked the woman across the ocean. Help me, Mama…

Amid the ghostly warble of old Soviet satellites circling over Prava, Mother gave her answer. Proceed, my little treasure! she said. Take those uncultured bastards for all they’re worth!

What? He looked up to the cardboard ceiling above him. He had not expected such criminal candor. But how can you be sure? What about the wrath of Cohen…

Cohen’s an ignoramus, came the reply. He’s no Lionya Abramov. Just another American, like that smiling hippopotamus-girl at my office who tried to screw me over last week. Who’s smiling now, fat suka? … No, the time for Phase Two has come, my son. Take your little poem to the reading. Do not be afraid…

Grateful for the imprimatur, Vladimir lifted his hands up to the sky, as if he could reach out across the ether of uncertain space and false memory and once again braid Mother’s hair on the long train ride to Yalta, massage the white scalp between her parted locks. If I succeed tomorrow, Vladimir told her, it will be because of you. You are the mistress of daring and perseverance. No matter how I may place my feet, I am endowed with everything you have taught me. Please do not worry for me…

My whole life is worry for you, Mother replied, but at this juncture, with a great declarative thump, the living-room door nearly collapsed under the force of two rifle butts.

“VLADIMIR BORISOVICH!” Aduo of throaty Russian voices shouted from the hallway, interrupting Vladimir’s transatlantic séance. “Hey, you! Opa! Wake up in there!”

Vladimir quickly waddled over to the door, losing both slippers in his haste, his ears still ringing with Mother’s godlike intonation. “What is the meaning?” he shouted. “I am an associate of the Groundhog!”

“The Groundhog wants you, pussycat,” one of the louts shouted back. “It’s banya time!”

Vladimir opened the door. “What banya? ” he said to the two big peasants, their faces completely yellowed by a lifetime of drinking, so that in the pale glow of the hallway they appeared perfectly green. “I have already bathed this morning.”

“The Groundhog said take Vladimir Borisovich to the banya, so put on a towel and let’s go,” they said in unison.

“What nonsense.”

“Do you dispute the Groundhog?”

“I follow the Groundhog’s imperatives blindly,” Vladimir told his intruders, who both looked like adult versions of Seryozha Klimov, the hooligan from kindergarten. What if they tried to pinch him to death à la Seryozha? Mother was certainly not here to protect him, and Lionya Abramov, his former best buddy, was probably running some sleazy night club in Haifa. “Where is this banya ?” Vladimir demanded.

“Building three. There is no changing room, so put on your towel now.”

“You expect me to walk over to building three in nothing but a towel.”

“That is the procedure.”

“Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“Yes,” the two men answered without hesitation. “We answer to Gusev!” one of them added, as if that alone explained their impertinence.

AS TOWEL-CLAD VLADIMIRwalked across the courtyard to the third panelak flanked by his two armed escorts, a group of Kasino whores peeked out of their gloomy hole to whistle at the near-naked young man, who instinctively covered his breasts with both hands the way he had seen buxom girls do it in pornographic literature. So it had been a setup! Gusev angling to humiliate him, that turd. Perhaps he had forgotten that Vladimir was the son of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin, the ruthless czarina of Scarsdale and Soviet kindergarten both… Well, thought Vladimir, we shall see who will fuck whom, or, as they say in Russian in two simple, elegant syllables— kto kovo.