Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

NEEDLESS TO SAY,alighting from a chauffeured BMW in front of the Wine Archive was guaranteed to drive these old folks out of their thick, wooly minds, but then Vladimir always enjoyed getting them a little riled up before ascending the stairs to the Blue Room to slurp down oysters and muscadet.

They had made their way through the Old Town in silence, Morgan still playing with her jacket’s zipper, rearranging her legs this way and that, rubbing her haunches against the car’s sleek Montana leather. Perhaps she was thinking about what she had said up on Repin Hill, all that nonsense about her panic-stricken university days; perhaps she was finally accepting just how much worse Vladimir’s life had been than hers. He could certainly tell her some stories; that could be an interesting dinner topic right there. Should he start her off with the Wonders of Soviet Kindergarten or go straight to his Floridian adventures with Jordi? “Triumph over adversity,” he would conclude. “That’s the story of Vladimir Girshkin, or else he wouldn’t be here wiping chutney mayo off that button nose of yours…”

BUT THAT CONVERSATIONwasn’t to be. Here’s what happened instead.

Immediately upon their pulling up to the Archive, the car was surrounded by grandmas screaming for blood. The babushkas were livelier than usual today, stirred up by the recent change in weather, the need to keep warm through agitation. Vladimir could make out a few of their chants, including that old chestnut “Death to the poststructuralists!” and the crowd-pleasing “Epicures, go home!” It was remarkable how so many cumbersome words had found a ready home in the mouths of peasants, how communist slogans sounded perfectly similar in any Slavic language.

Morgan opened her door. There was a moment of relative calm as she made her way out of the auto, a moment Vladimir used to note that Morgan—despite all her absurd talk of panic attacks and lashing out—was really just a quiet, steady woman in cheap dress shoes. This realization made Vladimir feel soft-hearted and protective. He was reminded of the Ohio driver’s license he had found in her wallet. Portrait of a high-school girl with a Big Dipper of acne arching across the nose, a teenager’s gloomy hue, shoulders hunched over to conceal the embarrassing contents of a baggy suburban sweatshirt. He felt a new font of tenderness opening up for her. “Let’s go home, Morgan,” he wanted to say. “You look so tired. Let’s get you some sleep. Let’s forget all this.”

It was too late.

Just as Vladimir slammed the car door behind them, one of the grandmas, the tallest of the Foot Guardians, a long, canine face, a tuft of chin hair, a red medal the size of a discus around her neck, shouldered her way past her colleagues, cleared her throat, and spit the warm results at Morgan, the sizeable spew floating right past her shoulder to land on the Beamer’s tinted window.

A gasp of amazement. A German auto worth two million crowns had been so cleverly defaced! The counterrevolution had begun in earnest! History, that slut, was finally on their side. The Guardians of the Foot stood up on their toes, the hero-invalids leaning forward on their crutches. “Speak, Baba Véra!” the crowd encouraged the spitter. “Speak, lamb of Lenin!”

The Red Lamb spoke. She said but one word. An entirely unexpected, uncalled-for, and decidedly uncommunist word. “Morgan,” Baba Véra said, the English name coming off her tongue rather naturally, both syllables intact. More. Gahn.

“Morgan na gulag! ” another old woman shouted.

“Morgan na gulag! Morgan na gulag! ” the rest of the grannies picked up the war cry. They were jumping now like youngsters on a May Day float—oh, happy days!—spitting freely at the car, tearing at their sparse hair, waving around their spiffy woolen caps, all except for one sad-eyed, bedraggled babushka who was quietly trying to sell Vladimir a sweater.

What the hell was this? What were they saying? Morgan to the Gulag? It couldn’t be. There must have been a terrible misunderstanding. “Comrade Pensioners!” Vladimir started to say in Russian. “On behalf of the fraternal Soviet people…”

Morgan pushed him back.

“Stay out of this,” she said.

“Sugar cane,” Vladimir mumbled. He had never seen her like this. Those dead gray eyes!

“This isn’t about you,” she said.

Everything was about him. He was the king of Prava, and she was, by extension, its denim-clad queen. “I think,” Vladimir said, “I think we should go home and rent—”

But there would be no Kurosawa tonight. In a flash of bared teeth, Morgan had turned on her tormentors. It all happened so fast. The tongue was pressed firmly against the upper palate… The letter R was thoroughly trilled… There followed several frothy explosions in the guise of Č, Š, and Ž …

The grandmothers pulled back in horror.

It was as if some devil, some kind of Slavic devil with a horrible American accent, was speaking through Morgan. “Shaker Heights,” Vladimir whispered, trying to console himself with geography. South Woodland Boulevard.

But he was thinking of someone else, another Morgan, because in place of that warm, nature-loving creature, a far-fetched, worldly one was now shouting at the grandmothers in remarkably fluent Stolovan, dropping the word “polemical” as easily as the real Morgan drove tent stakes into the topsoil.

“Š mertí k nogù!” the sham Morgan was hollering, her face twisted into unlikely anger, a white-knuckled fist raised in solidarity with some mysterious non-Ohioan life-force. Death to the Foot!

“Eh,” Vladimir said, instinctively making his way back to the car.

Meanwhile, Baba Véra, all bad teeth and vitriol, her red Medal of Socialist Labor flapping in the wind, had come snout-to-snout with Morgan and was conveying any number of sentiments Vladimir could not quite make out. The name Tomaš kept coming up and Vladimir assumed blyat’ meant “whore” in Stolovan as well as in his native tongue.

“Morgan!” Vladimir shouted in exasperation. He was on the verge of asking Jan to start up the Beamer and spirit him away to the Joy or the Repré, someplace full of velvety throw cushions and fuzzy expats, someplace where the entropy factor was nil and everything was primed to go Vladimir’s way.

Because, to be honest, he could no longer abide this impostor who spoke an obscure Eastern European language, who dueled communist grannies to the death over a hundred-meter galosh, who maintained (sexual?) relations with some mysterious Tomaš, who kept a sealed, secret room in her panelak apartment, and whose life clearly extended beyond dating Vladimir and teaching English to hotel clerks.

“Morgan!” he cried once more, this time without any conviction.

And then, just as Morgan was turning to face her befuddled Vladimir, Baba Véra ambled up and pushed her with one gnarled paw.

Morgan stumbled back a little, there was a moment when her balance seemed lost, but in the end those strong twenty-three-year-old legs kept her aloft. The next thing Vladimir realized was that Jan had somehow made his way between Morgan and the old woman. There was the sound of hard against soft. A shriek. Vladimir’s eyes did not react as quickly as his ears. It took him some time to register the situation on the ground.

Baba Véra was on her knees.

There was a collective rumble of disbelief.

A shiny black object.

Baba Véra touched her forehead. There was no blood. Just a circle of red, a smaller version of the medal cradled between her breasts.

The Guardians of the Foot were wordlessly backing away from their fallen comrade. The wiener-dogs were yapping their tiny lungs out.