Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Psh, psh,” the soldiers were saying in the background, their heads raised to the sky, as if they were too embarrassed to look down at Vladimir and Cohen, the latter with his head folded fetally into his stomach, looking like a half-rolled sleeping bag.

“We heard it!” Gusev shouted. “The talk on the radio scanner! Two Americans crawling across Ujezd Street, one of them dark-haired and hook-nosed… We knew immediately who it was!”

“Look at them… How drunk!” one of the soldiers said, shaking his head as if it was something fantastic to behold.

Vladimir, a young gentleman in many ways, and one raised to appreciate proper bearing and the importance of seeming sober, genuinely considered becoming embarrassed. His associate Cohen, in particular, cut a pretty poor figure at this point, all balled up and moaning something about “hating it, absolutely hating it.” But then for Gusev and his men to castigate Vladimir after they probably just got back from neutering some Bulgarians or the like struck Vladimir as something of an injustice. “Gusev!” he said, struggling to achieve in his voice both control and condescension. “Enough of this. Get me a taxi immediately!”

“You’re in no position to dictate orders,” Gusev said. He flicked his wrist dismissively; it would seem his advance staff had never informed him that this particular expression of absolute power had become passé about a century ago. “Get inside my car immediately, Girshkin,” he said, shaking the collars of his coat so that the indistinguishable remains of dead nutrias shimmered in the street light. It was clear that in a different world, under a different regime but with the same armed men at his disposal, Mikhail Gusev would have been a very important man.

“My American associate and I refuse!” Vladimir said in Russian. He felt a swirl in his stomach, the undulation of his daily intake of gulash, potato dumplings, and booze, and hoped to God that he wouldn’t throw up right then and there, for that would certainly mean losing the argument. “You have embarrassed me enough. My American associate and I were on our way to a late-night meeting. Who knows what he thinks of us Russians now.”

“It is you, Girshkin, who have made us into the laughingstock of Prava. And just when we have cemented our understanding with this city’s police. Oh, no, no, friend. Tonight, you ride home with me. And then we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya… ”

Cohen must have sensed the malice in his voice, for despite his utter incomprehension of Russian, he made a mooing sound from within his fetal ball. “No!” Vladimir translated Cohen’s mooing into Russian for Gusev’s benefit. He was becoming all the more frightened himself. Just what was Gusev planning to do with him? “Your insubordination is noted, Gusev. If you refuse to call for a taxi, give me the mobile and I will do so myself.”

Gusev turned back to his men who were as yet unsure whether they should laugh or take this small drunkard seriously, but after Gusev gave them the nod the laughter began in earnest. Smiling solicitously, Gusev began his approach.

“Do you know what I am going to do to you, my goose?” Gusev whispered to Vladimir, although his thick Russian sibilants were loud enough for the entire block to hear. “Do you know how long it takes to solve a crime in this city when you have friends at Municipal House? Remember that leg they found in the sock bin at the Kmart? I wonder who it was we dismembered that day. Was it his excellency the Ukrainian ambassador? Or was that the day we circumcised the minister of fishing and hatcheries? Would you like me to tell you? How about I look in my log book? Better still, how about I snuff you and your little friend? Why waste a hundred words when one bullet will do between you two pederasts?”

He was close enough for Vladimir to smell the intense shoe-polish reeking off his motorcycle boots. Vladimir opened his mouth—what was he going to do? Recite Pushkin? Bite Gusev’s leg? He, Vladimir, had done something to Jordi back in the Floridian hotel room… He had…

“Opa, boys!” Gusev shouted to his men. “Can you see the article in the Stolovan Ekspress tomorrow? ‘Two Americans Die in Suicide Pact Over Rising Price of Beer.’ What do you think, brothers? Tell me I’m not a funny one tonight!”

A debate began between Gusev and a gun-toting associate over a proposal to throw the two foreigners off the Foot. Vladimir suddenly found himself strangely weary. His watery eyelids began to close…

With the passing minutes, the voices of the men became gradually indistinct, sounding more like the insistent honking of geese than the rapid hooligan Russian that Gusev’s fellows preferred. And then…

THERE WAS ANunexpected sound. The make-believe sound of a Hollywood fairy tale. The sound of a getaway car squealing around a street corner and swerving into the narrow space between Gusev and his troops.

Jan got out of Vladimir’s Beamer looking like a domesticated loon in an ensemble of coarse-wool winter pajamas. “I have orders,” he shouted to Gusev and then to the former Interior Ministry troops. “Orders directly from the Groundhog. I’m exclusively authorized to take Girshkin home!”

Gusev calmly took out his gun.

“Move aside, sir,” Jan said to Gusev. “Let me help Mr. Girshkin up. As I’ve said, I have orders…”

Gusev grabbed the young Stolovan by his shoulders. He spun him around, then took hold of his pajama collar with one arm, sandwiching the gun into the folds of his neck with the other. “What orders?” he said.

For some time then, only the churning of his stomach reminded Vladimir of the passing of time, each revolution indicating yet another temporal unit in which he remained alive while Jan remained in Gusev’s grasp. Finally, his driver, not a small man but small beneath Gusev’s inflated face, reached into a leather holster wound beneath his pajamas and, hand shaking only slightly, took out a mobile phone. “The Groundhog has been following your whereabouts on the scanner,” Jan said to Gusev, his usually halting Russian now true and precise. “To speak truthfully, he is worried over Mr. Girshkin’s safety at your hands. If you would like, I will dial the Groundhog directly.”

The silence continued except for the metallic click of a weapon either being decommissioned or readied for combat. Then Gusev let go. He turned away quickly, leaving the defeat in his face to Vladimir’s imagination. The next thing that registered with Vladimir was the slam of a car door. A dozen motors started up, all nearly at once. A lone babushka, her voice as frail from sleep as from age, had opened up her window from across the street and started shouting for silence or she’d send for the police one more time.

Arranged horizontally in the back seat of his car, while the propped-up Cohen rode shotgun, Vladimir willed himself to pass out, if not into eternal sleep then at least into a subset of eternity. It was not possible. His head was a Central Casting of acne-scarred skinheads, hysterical policemen, fatigue-clad Interior Ministry braves, and, of course, the odd Soviet customs agent with sturgeon breath.

“You’ll be back, Yid,” the customs agent had said to Mother.

HE WAS BACK.

Sure he had given fleeing some thought. And why not? His DeutscheBank account did contain around fifty thousand dollars—his commission from the Harold Green scam—which would last him awhile in someplace Vancouverish. But, no, that would be an overreaction. Not to mention cowardly.

A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discreetly kick him in the ass.