Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Rave,” Cohen said helpfully.

“A good rave. Ah, I even know a terrific Finnish disk jockey. MC Paavo. Have you heard of him? No? He’s successful in Helsinki, but not very happy there. Too clean, he says, although I don’t know, I’ve never been.”

“He should come here!” Cohen said, smashing his shot glass against the bar. Vladimir quickly dropped a hundred-crown note for the damage.

“I think he’d like to, but he needs a sure thing, a contract. He’s got the needy former wives and then also the little MCs running around in the Laplands. The Finns are very familial, which is why perhaps they enjoy the world’s highest rate of suicide.” He chuckled and signaled for another round, pointing to Plank’s empty stool and shaking his finger as if to say, “minus one.”

“Well, did you know that Vladimir is the vice president of PravaInvest?”

“Um,” Vladimir said.

“There’s actually something called PravaInvest?” The Stolovan contained his mischievous smile, but clearly with effort and a lot of blinking. “Do post me a prospectus immediately, gentlemen.”

“Oh yes!” Cohen said, oblivious to the apparatchik’s sarcastic tone. “PravaInvest is gargantuan. I understand it’s capitalized with over 35 billion dollars.”

František looked at Vladimir long and straight as if to say, “One of those, eh?”

“Um,” Vladimir said again. “It’s no big deal, really.”

“Well, don’t you see?” Cohen was exasperated. “He’ll fund your nightclub! Just bring over the Finn and we’re set.”

Vladimir sighed at the rashness of his young associate. “Of course, nothing’s that easy,” he said. “In the real world there are impediments. The skyrocketing price of real estate in central Prava, for example.”

“That I wouldn’t count as a problem,” František said. “See, if you opened it up in the town center you would get basically the rich German tourists. But if you operate on the city outskirts and at the same time you’re convenient to public transportation or a short taxi ride from the center, then you get a more exclusive, sophisticated clientele. I mean, how many truly trendy clubs are there on the Champs-Élysées? Or on Fifth Avenue in Midtown? It’s just not done.”

“He’s right! He’s right!” said the irrepressible Cohen. “Why don’t you just invest in this thing, hmm? Come on, do us all a favor. You know there’s no fun left at the Nouveau or the Joy on a Saturday with all those fucking papa’s girls and mama’s boys and that shit they play… That shit! How can they play that shit and still charge you fifteen crowns for admission?”

“That’s fifty cents,” Vladimir reminded him.

“Well, be that as it may,” Cohen said, now talking almost exclusively to František, the way a child turns to one parent after being refused by the other, “but that’s still no reason not to start this thing, especially with MC Pavel on board.”

Vladimir lifted his beer up to his twitching face. “Yes, but you see, Mr. František, PravaInvest is a very concerned, socially aware multinational. Its philosophy is to concentrate on essential needs based on a country’s conditions on the ground, in a Cartesian sense, of course, at what we call ‘point of entry.’ And, believe me, this country needs a good locally produced fax modem more than it needs another dance club or casino.”

“I don’t know about that,” František said. “Maybe not casinos, which are, on the whole, quite desperate places, but a nice, new dance club could be, how is it they say in America… A ‘morale booster’?”

Perhaps it was František’s accent returning after so much alcohol, the way Vladimir’s was prone to do, but when their new Stolovan friend said “casino,” Vladimir could picture it only with a K, which led him naturally to the Kasino in his panelak, and, by extension, to the friendly Russian women who entertained there, and by the furthest of extensions, to the tremendous waste of potential space therein. A nightclub.

He accepted yet another shot from the barmaid who, in the poor light and the long-settled darkness, wore an expression that couldn’t be gauged; it could only be surmised that she spoke with expressiveness about something. “This round is free,” František translated, smiling with pride at the generosity of his countrywoman.

“Morale booster,” Vladimir said after the vodka had gone down and burned his insides with the compressed fury of the thousand Polish potato fields that had been depotatoed to produce this vintage. “So how good is this MC Paavo when compared to what they have in London and New York?”

“He’s better than Tokyo,” František said with the surety of a connoisseur and tipped his bar stool toward Vladimir so that their eyes, red and moist from the festivities, were as close as etiquette allowed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Conditions-on-the-Ground,” he said. “And I know about your little business with Harry Green. Perhaps we should meet and discuss further possibilities.”

Meanwhile, the stereo was running out of Michael Jackson. Outside, in the frigid air and by the light of the moon, the soldiers were singing some sort of a local song with an oom-pah-pah beat that clearly could have benefited from the deployment of an actual band. Plank could be heard producing unsettling sounds in the bathroom. “Ah,” František said, moving away from Vladimir slightly, as he knew that Westerners did not like to share breath. “Speaking of peasant choruses, there’s one. It’s about a little mare who is very upset at her master because he sent her to the smith to get cobbled. And now she refuses to give him a kiss.”

Cohen nodded to Vladimir, his eyes narrow with understanding, as if there was a lesson in there for everyone. They heard Plank struggling with the lock of the bathroom and cursing himself, but they sat drunk and motionless, until the barmaid came to his rescue.

HOW IT HAPPENEDthat they missesd Jan and the car was for Vladimir a bitter lesson in the downside of alcoholism. Apparently he and Cohen had stumbled into the beer garden and there took the wrong pathway out; that is, instead of walking into Jan and the car they walked into a silent, charcoal-stained street whose silence was broken by the jangle of a tram bell and the screech of rails. “Ah!” they cried, mistaking the passing tram for some kind of heavenly sign, and they staggered after it, waving their arms as if they were bidding adieu to an ocean liner. Soon enough, the yellow-lighted warmth drew closer, and they climbed aboard on all fours, shouting “Dobry den’!” to the dusty factory workers snoozing in the back.

It was only after they had gone several neighborhoods down toward somewhere or other that Vladimir remembered Jan and the BMW. “Oh,” he said, butting Cohen in the side, in response to which Cohen took out a sparkling bottle of vodka. This was a gift František had given them along with his phone and fax numbers before he departed the beer garden, dragging the incapacitated Plank along to a nearby pad for a refresher course in sobriety. Vladimir had been unsure about the last part. He held a tainted view of visiting older men and their sleeping quarters, especially when the whole scene had been stirred with alcohol. But what to do?

“Ve drink,” Cohen said, failing at a Russian accent.

“We’re drunk,” Vladimir said, uncapping the bottle nonetheless. “Where are we?” he said, pressing his nose to the cool window pane, watching the drooping lindens, the small apartment houses peeking out from behind manicured hedges. “What the hell are we doing here?”

They turned to look at one another. It was a serious question at three in the morning and they tussled for the bottle in exasperation, a struggle which, for the sake of clarification, was not conducted with the energy of, say, two farm boys just coming into their pubescent strength.