Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Promise me!”

“Ai, let go… Yes, of course, I won’t, I swear. Oh, you big corn-fed animal!”

“Stop calling me that.”

“I’m being affectionate. And you are bigger than me. And more corn-fed. It’s identity—”

“Yes, identity politics,” Morgan said. “Anyway, asshole, you told me we’d finally go to your place this weekend. You said you’d finally introduce me to your Russian friends. That guy who called yesterday was so cute and scared. And I’ve never heard of such an exotic name: Surok. Sounds kind of Indian. I looked it up in the dictionary, and I think in Stolovan it means ‘mole’ or ‘marmot’ or something. What does it mean in Russian? And when am I going to meet him? And when are you going to take me to your place? Huh, asshole?” She pulled on his nose, but gently.

Vladimir imagined Morgan and the Groundhog breaking bread at the weekly biznesmenski lunch, with its customary postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kasino girls going down on the Hog to the tune of ABBA’s ‘Take a Chance on Me,’ Gusev drunkenly railing against the Yid-Masonic global conspiracy.

“It’s out of the question,” Vladimir said. “There’s no hot water in the entire panelak until December, the boiler’s leaking sulfites, there’s airborne hepatitis in the elevator…”

And the whole place is the preserve of armed thieves and bandits mostly drawn from the ranks of the former USSR’s toe-crushing, electric shock–happy security organs. “You know, I’ve got to get out of that place,” Vladimir said. “Maybe I should just move in here? We’ll save on rent. What do you pay? Fifty dollars a month? We could split it. Twenty-five each. What do you think?”

“Well,” Morgan said. “That would be fine, I guess.” She plucked a piece of fluff from Vladimir’s chest hair, examined it closely, then set it down in her lap where it floated dreamily along the inseam of her jeans. “Except.”

Minutes passed. Vladimir prodded her stomach. Theirs was a relationship more silent than most he had known, and it suited him well—a lack of words implying a lack of conflict, the sleepy embraces and mutual gargling in the morning articulating a simpler, working-class kind of love. And yet, there were times when her silence seemed misplaced, when she would stare at Vladimir with the same uncertainty she reserved for her cat, an abused local stray who under Morgan’s care had grown to Western proportions and now lived a somber, secret life by the windowsill.

“Except,” Vladimir said.

“I’m sorry…” she said. “I—”

“You don’t want me to move in with you?” She didn’t want Vladimir Girshkin on a dusk-to-dusk basis? She didn’t want to teach him how to scrape mold off the shower curtain? She didn’t want to grow slow and fat with him, the way other couples did in their panelak s? “I’m practically living here as it is,” Vladimir whispered, scaring himself with the sadness of his voice.

She rose from her nesting place, exposing Vladimir to the killer drafts. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said.

“It’s Saturday,” Vladimir protested.

“I’ve got to tutor that rich guy on the Brezhnevska Embankment.”

“What’s his name?” Vladimir said. “Another To-mash?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “Half the men in this country are named Tomaš. It’s kind of an ugly name, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, drawing an enormous goosefeather comforter over himself. “Yes, it is. In any language.” He watched her change into long underwear. He tried to stay angry at her, but the thwock of the underwear’s elastic against that round little belly of hers filled him with feelings of longing and domesticity both. Belly. Long underwear. Goosefeather comforter. He yawned and watched Morgan’s cat yawn in unison across the room.

He’d have to break into that sealed room some other time, when he wasn’t so sleepy. Nobody kept secrets from Vladimir Girshkin. He’d have Jan help him out; Jan loved to smash things in with his shoulder. They were always replacing car windows and such.

And he’d move in with her sooner or later, too. Cohen had shown him Alexandra’s confidential report. There was no other way.

AFTER WORK, VLADIMIRand Morgan would drive into the city and have a kale-and-cabbage lunch at the new Hare Krishna joint, or head for the Nouveau where they drank Turkish coffees and became awake and animated, played footsie to the quick time of Dixieland jazz. But most of the time they spent walking, power-walking, for the November chill was making them brisk. Battling the wind, they would climb to the highest peak of Repin Hill, Prava’s loftiest mountain, a green acropolis crying out for a parthenon. At this altitude, the Old Town across the river resembled a garage-sale assortment of bric-a-brac, the powder towers looking like blackened pepper shakers, the Art Nouveau mansions a collection of gilded music boxes.

“It’s really something,” Morgan once said. “Just look at all those construction cranes by the Kmart. People are going to come here twenty years from now, and they’ll never know what it was like when all this happened. They’ll have to read your poems or Cohen’s poems or Maxine’s metaessays…”

Vladimir was not looking at the golden city but rather in the opposite direction, at an ad-hoc sausage stand, a greasy little bratwurst Imbiß the locals had quickly set up to feed the hungry Germans. “Sure, it’s a special time,” he said, eyeing a plump little wurst curling over a slice of rye, “but we must beware the encroachment of… um… you know… the multinationals.”

“I feel so remarkably at ease here,” Morgan said, ignoring him. “So free of anxiety. There were times in college last year, when I would just stand there in the mailroom and feel this incredible panic. Just this kind of… unexplained… craziness. Have you ever felt like that, Vladimir?”

“Yes, of course,” Vladimir said. He eyed her skeptically. Panic? What could she know of panic? The world lay prostrate at her feet. When one of the big birds, an owl, perhaps, had tried to eat Vladimir in the forest, she had merely to say “Bad!” to the creature in her firm, customer-is-always-right tone, and off it went, hooting miserably into the canopy of trees. Panic? Not likely.

“The blood starts draining from your hands and feet,” Morgan was saying, “and then from your head, too, so that you get dizzy. The campus shrink told me it was a classic panic attack. Have you ever seen a shrink, Vlad?”

“Russians are not keen on psychiatry,” Vladimir explained. “Life is sad for us and so we must bear it.”

“Just asking. Anyway, I would get these panic attacks in the middle of the day, when absolutely nothing was happening. It was strange. I knew I was going to graduate, my grades weren’t so bad, I had some pretty cool friends, I was dating this guy, not the brightest, but you know… College.”

“Ohio,” Vladimir said, trying to create a sense of place for himself. He thought of the progressive Midwestern college he had briefly attended. Nude relay-racing at the workers’ solidarity festival, steamy Get to Know You showers at the dorm, the massive spring-break sexual-identity crisis. They had practically invented panic attacks at that college.

“Yes, Ohio,” Morgan said. “So what I’m saying is, my life was okay. There was nothing wrong with it. I was doing pretty good with my parents. My mother would drive down from Cleveland and I’d be, you know, just walking her to her car and she would start crying and telling me how lucky I was, how pretty, how perfect. It was kind of sweet, but maybe a little weird, too. Sometimes she’d drive down a hundred and fifty miles to Columbus just to give me a new Nordstrom charge card or a six-pack of soda pop, and then turn around and drive right back home. I don’t know. I guess she really missed me. They really fucked up with my brother the year before. Dad sort of press-ganged him into working at the firm one summer and that was just the end… I think he’s in Belize now. We haven’t heard from him since last Christmas. Almost a year now.”