Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“I wasn’t doing much myself,” she shouted from what must have been the kitchen, for Vladimir heard water running. She was likely dealing with the creamy buildup on her forehead. “I live so far from the center. Leaving this place is such a bother.”

Such a bother. An older person’s phrase. But said with a young person’s carelessness. Vladimir recalled this kind of paradox from the young Middle American natives he encountered during his college year, and the recollection relaxed him. After they were both settled on the couch and she had brought out a sad little local wine and a paper cup for Vladimir to drink from (the splotch on her forehead remained!), a question-and-answer period followed, one which Vladimir found as familiar as the words to the “Internationale.”

“Where’s your accent from?”

“I am Russian,” Vladimir said, in the grave voice which that admission called for.

“That’s right, Alexandra told me something about that. I studied a little Russian in college, you know.”

“Where did you go?”

“OSU,” she said. “Ohio State.” It sounded perfectly reasonable coming out of her mouth, but it made Vladimir think of the “frat-hog” at the Café Nouveau whose Ohio State T-shirt had made Alexandra laugh.

“So Russian was your major?”

“No, psychology.”

“Ahh…”

“But I took a lot of humanities classes.”

“Ohh…”

Silence.

“Do you remember any Russian?”

She smiled and straightened out a growing partition in her robe, which Vladimir had been watching carefully, feeling piglike and uncouth in his voyeurism. “I just remember a few words…”

Vladimir already knew what those few words were. For some reason, Americans undertaking his impossible language were compelled to say “I love you.” Perhaps this was a legacy of the Cold War. All that suspicion and lack of cultural exchange fueling the desires of young, well-wishing American men and women to bridge the gap, to dismantle those nukes by falling into the arms of some soulful, enigmatic Russian sailor, or his counterpart, the warm and sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl. The fact that, in reality, the soulful Russian sailor was smashed out of his mind half the time and held to a rather loose definition of date rape, while the sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl was covered in pigshit six days out of the week, was fortunately concealed by that gray and nonporous entity, the Iron Curtain.

“Ya vas loobloo,” she said on cue.

“Why, thank you,” Vladimir said.

They laughed and blushed and Vladimir felt himself naturally moving across the couch to be closer to her, although a very safe distance remained. The way her unfashionably long brown hair was coiled limply around her neck, the way it ended in tangles across the faded lavender of the bathrobe made Vladimir feel sorry for her; it aroused him too. She could be so beautiful if she wanted to. Why wasn’t she then?

“So, what are you doing tonight?” he said. “Feel like taking in a movie?”

A movie. That sacred rite of dating which he had never performed. Not with his college girlfriend, the Chicagoan (straight to bed); or Frannie (straight to bar); or even Challah (straight to nervous tears and hiccuping).

And how about “taking one in”? You couldn’t go wrong with a boy who used language like that and probably waved earnestly and said, “Take care, now, hear,” when Uncle Trent took off for the Rotary Club. Accent be damned, you were safe with Vladimir Girshkin.

She squinted at her tiny watch and tapped it purposefully, as if she was on a tight schedule which Vladimir had rudely thrown off-kilter with his dreams of cinema and maybe one of his skinny arms around her shoulders. “I haven’t seen a movie since I got here,” she said.

She scooped up the latest Prava-dence, and leaned toward Vladimir to hold the paper aloft for them both. Despite her being disheveled and marooned on a Friday night, a clean smell emerged from the crux of her uplifted arms. Was there ever a time when American women weren’t so extraterrestrially clean? He really wanted to kiss her.

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation’s sensitive people.

Morgan excused herself to the bathroom to change (finally!) while Vladimir took in her room, lovingly filled with mass-manufactured knickknacks from both the New World and the Old, which lined several plywood “instant” shelves: a fading charcoal drawing of Prava’s castle, a tiny moss-green mermaid statue from Copenhagen, a cracked beer stein from some place called the Great Lakes Brewing Company, a blown-up photo of a fat, disembodied hand dangling a striped bass (Dad?), a framed flyer advertising an industrial noise band named “Marty and the Fungus” (old boyfriend?), and a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat. The only incongruous item was a large poster illustrating the Foot in all its Stalinist glory leaning precariously over the Old Town Hall. Beneath it, a Stolovan slogan: “Graždanku! Otporim vsyechi Stalinski çudoviši!” Vladimir could never be sure of the funny Stolovan language, but translated into normal Russian this could be an exhortation along the lines of “Citizens! Let us take the ax to all of Stalin’s monstrosities!” Hm. That was a little unexpected.

He closed his eyes and tried to take all of her in—the warm round face, the serious gaze, the awkward little mouth, the soft body bundled in terry cloth, the harmless errata on her shelf. Yes, there were probably quirks and inconsistencies in her personality with which Vladimir would eventually have to contend, but, at present, she certainly made for a wonderful demographic. Vladimir, too, could make himself into a pretty good demo: his recent income ranked him in the upper ten percent of U.S. households, and he believed in monogamy with a sad kind of romantic fierceness that would certainly put him ahead of most men in the polls. Yes, the numbers were right; now the magical American love thing had to happen, which it usually did when the numbers were right.

And then he noticed that she was out of the bathroom and talking to him about something… What was it? The Foot? He had been looking at the Foot poster. What was she saying? Down with Stalin? Up with the people? She was definitely saying something about the Foot and the long-put-upon Stolovan nation. But despite her insistent tone, Vladimir was too busy thinking about a strategy to make her love him to hear the particulars of what she was saying. Yes, it was time for the love thing to happen.

WELL, SHE DIDlook good after her makeover! She was dressed in a little silk blouse which, she must have been aware, defined her contours closely, and had her hair completely up, save for a few stray wisps that fell out of the bun adorably, after a fashion he had seen in contemporary New York subway ads. Perhaps later he could take her to Larry Litvak’s cocktail party—to which he had been invited by phone, postcard, and several gooey encounters with the man himself—and, once there, show her exactly where Vladimir Girshkin was lodged in Prava’s social firmament.

The theater was in the Lesser Quarter, meters from the Emanuel Bridge and close enough to the castle to be in audible range of the bells of its cathedral. Like all real estate of its caliber the theater was crammed with young foreigners, the bulk of them wearing black-and-orange down jackets and baseball caps with logos of American sports teams worn backward. This was the year’s fall fashion-statement for that hideously sterile human mass expanding via satellite from Laguna Beach to Guangdong Province— the international middle class —and it made Vladimir yearn for winter and heavy overcoats and the end of the tourist season, as if there would ever be an end.