Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

A month had passed since Larry Litvak’s party, but those legs—firm white flesh mottled by young blue veins, each thigh a stanza of socialist realism—continued to thrill and beguile young Vladimir. Waking up in Morgan’s panelak apartment at an ungodly seven in the morning, Vladimir saw the aforementioned legs, thick, muscular, perhaps a bit unfeminine to his unenlightened eyes, and, what was the word, springy? She sprang out of bed on those legs, rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed and rinsed and prepared herself for a long day’s work. These were legs that had been put to the toughest use from early age, and each day of basketball camp had only added to their agility and muscular heft. And now these legs, if the occasion ever warranted, could easily have piggybacked Vladimir across Mount Elbrus.

But instead of Mount Elbrus, the legs we have spoken of, firm like eggplants in a pair of denims and hiking boots, were soon put to use at a Stolovan national park, a basin of green between two rocky cliffs two hundred kilometers to the north of Prava. Surprisingly, the home-loving Vladimir was called upon to accompany her through this wilderness. He had had Jan drop them off at the mouth of the park, and then, with Morgan’s sturdy legs supporting a foldup tent tethered to her back, they crossed an interminable vista of underbrush-clogged forest, rills expanding into proper streams capped off with foamy waterfalls, a meadow, which served as the home to an unpredictable deerlike animal that peeked out of the tall grass with its dark liquid eyes. Finally, the sweating, grunting Vladimir, holding onto a walking stick with one hand and carrying a little sack of Chinese apples in the other, found himself on a granite ledge overlooking a minilake where fish, frogs, and dragonflies commuted to and from the various mossy shores. Vladimir breathed in the clean air, felt Kostya’s spirit smile approvingly from a nearby tree, and watched Morgan take off her tent-pack and begin to assemble the damn thing.

“Hello, creation!” he shouted, spitting onto a lily pad that bobbed along indifferently. Despite nature’s dictatorial regime, its cult of greenness, he had found himself enjoying their two-hour hike, the way the landscape trembled before him, animals scampering, tree branches giving way, and now came the real payoff—a rare chance to be completely alone with his new friend in a queer and beautiful place.

It was about time. They had barely spent one daylight hour together in the weeks following Larry’s fête. Just as Vladimir had suspected, Morgan worked as an English teacher. She held a ten-hour-a-day job imparting the language to a mostly proletarian audience in the suburbs, aspirants to Prava’s burgeoning service industry who wanted to say, “Here is a clean bath towel,” and “Would you like me to call the police now, sir?”

Teaching English was the standard job for those Americans in Prava who didn’t have full parental backing, and Morgan went about it in her own methodic way—responsibility über alles —ignoring all of Vladimir’s attempts to get her to play hooky and spend the day running around with him. Vladimir was sure that all of her male students were in love with her and had asked her out many times for coffee and drinks in the quick-fire, automatic way of European men trying to seduce American women. He was also sure that she would immediately turn red enough to make all but the most incorrigible lotharios reconsider their attack and would say in her slow, tutorial way: “I have boy friend.”

HE WATCHED HERdig her heels into the dry autumn soil and then start to hoist the tent canvas over a pair of sticks. Her legs were never as beautiful to Vladimir as when they were folded over her great big bottom, the way they were at present. He felt the stirrings of excitement and pressed a palm against his groin, when he was distracted by that thing with feathers: bird.

“Hawk!” Vladimir cried as the predator circled overhead, its terrifying beak pointed at his person.

Morgan was banging another stick into the ground with a rock. She wiped her forehead and breathed hot breath down her shirt. “A partridge,” she said. “Why don’t you help me set this up? You don’t like to exert yourself very much, do you? You’re sort of a… I don’t know how to describe you… A chewer of cud.”

“I’m a capital loss,” Vladimir confirmed. A chewer of cud. That was clever! She was catching on. The Crowd was working its magic.

He held the tent’s canvas in place, while she worked the rocks and sticks. He watched over her with quiet admiration, trying to picture a brown-haired girl, pretty but not the prettiest in her sixth grade, squashing mosquitoes against her forehead on a back porch; at her feet, a partly deflated rubber toy lying on its side, a dinosaur from a television cartoon; waterlogged cards on the patio table, slimy to the touch, their reds and yellows running together, a diamond knave without a head; upstairs in the master bedroom the last tremors of an inconsequential fight between Mother and Father about some instance of jealousy, a petty humiliation, or perhaps just the boredom of this particular life with its summer hot dogs, pennant championships, lake effect winds, November democracy, the raising of three children with strong springy legs and big hands that reached out to touch and comfort, that hoisted fat little bodies up elm trees to frighten squirrels out of nests, offered up basketballs to the permanently gray skies, pitched tent stakes into the ground…

Here Vladimir stopped. What did he know? What could he know of her childhood? It was poor luck, a sun-blinded stork that had plucked him down at the Birthing House on Tchaikovsky Prospekt and not the famed Cleveland Clinic. Ach, the old questions of the beta immigrant: How did one go about changing one’s warbling tongue, one’s half-destroyed parents, the very stink of one’s body? Or, more personally: how did he, Vladimir, end up here, a third-rate criminal in the middle of a crisp European forest, watching a tent going up lakeside, a tough, handsome, and yet entirely unremarkable woman silently building a temporary home for the both of them?

“Are you getting tired?” he asked her with what he thought was real affection, holding on to the canvas with one hand and reaching down to pat her damp hair with the other. She was fussing with a tent pole, a hook, and another implement, and he was touched by the sight of a body more plausible than his, the body of a woman who approached the earth on equal terms; all of her—feet, biceps, kneecaps, spinal column—all of her serving a purpose, whether hopping three trams to the far reaches of Prava, miming down the price of a root vegetable at the Gypsy market, or hacking her way through straw-colored foliage.

Fran, Challah, Mother, Dr. Girshkin, Mr. Rybakov, Vladimir Girshkin, each had invested a lifetime into building a refuge from the world, be it a bed of money, a talking fan, a cordon of books, a rickety basement izba, a shelf of half-empty K-Y jars, a shaky pyramid scheme…But this woman, seen here wielding an awl-type thing over a difficult stake, had nothing in particular to run from. She was on vacation. She could have been puffing grass in Thailand, biking through Ghana, or snorkeling above that infernal Barrier Reef, but she happened to be here, bopping along to the cultural beat of a failed empire with her powerful legs and good disposition. And at some point her vacation would be over and she would go home. He would be waving her good-bye from the tarmac.

“I’m almost finished,” she said.

She was almost finished, which made Vladimir feel sad, prematurely abandoned, angry, in awe, in love, at a loss—many things that somehow came together and expressed themselves as arousal. Those thick legs again. Denim covered in soil. It was a strange feeling, but oddly natural, elemental. “Good,” he said, reaching down to barely touch a warm shoulder. “That’s good.”