Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

And he told them.

IT WAS Aday commemorating the transition from November to December, with the local trees hanging on to the last of yellow, the leaden sky cut with lines of ethereal blue where the whipping winds had cleared a swath through the pollution. The Russians, dressed in the black-and-orange Perry Ellis windbreakers that Vladimir now required of all employees, were sitting around the clearing (the same clearing where Vladimir and Kostya staged their athletic drills) like a ring of dark butterflies. In the background, an armada of twenty BMWs and a dozen jeeps were being cannibalized by a team of German mechanics in smocks.

Out came the zebra-striped seats, the woolly cup holders, the shocking Electric Plum ground effects—all tossed water-brigade–style past a line of bobbing blond heads and into the circle of the clearing. There, the personal offerings to the God of Kitsch were already assembled: the nylon tracksuits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog’s vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War–losers—all would be kindling for the flames.

As those lowest on the totem pole splashed gasoline across this burial ground of rosy-cheeked nesting dolls and giant lacquered soup ladles, some of the older women—Marusya, the opium lady, and her clique, in particular—began to whimper and make soft clicking sounds of regret. They wiped their eyes and adjusted each other’s head scarves, often collapsing into mournful embraces.

In a matter of seconds, the fire began its crackling susurrations. Then something unstable (perhaps it was the giant can of brilliantine with which Gusev’s men slicked back their thinning hair) exploded with a trace of orange into the darkening sky, and the crowd gaped at the pyrotechnics, the more adventurous young men bringing their hands forward for warmth.

The Groundhog, sighing with the entirety of his soft chest, took an impressive swig out of his vodka flask, then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out the two fuzzy dice that had previously bounced one against the other from the rearview mirror of his BMW, like two puppies with just each other for amusement. He rubbed them together as if to create another fire, then sunk his nose inside one of them. After a few minutes of this melancholia, the Hog leaned back, smiled, closed his eyes, and cast both dice into the flames.

THROUGHOUT THE PROCEEDINGSin the auditorium and in the woods, those of an inquiring nature could turn around to see an attractive middle-aged gentleman with a PravaInvest visitor’s tag sitting apart from the herd and doodling in his little memo pad. In a white shirt and corduroy vest, with a gentle, bemused expression on his face, he appeared rather harmless. And yet despite the organization’s closely followed axiom that harmless people should always be sent to the hospital, no one dared approach this strange professorial man who chewed on his pen and smiled for no reason. He was more than harmless. He was František.

And he was impressed. “Brilliant!” he said to Vladimir, leading him away from the clearing and toward a wrecked suburban highway where Jan and the car were waiting. “You really are Postmodern Man, my friend. The bonfire and the self-denunciation contest… I must say, you are clown and ringmaster all at once! And thank you for helping me get rid of those infernal windbreakers.”

“Ah,” Vladimir said, clasping his hands to his bosom. “You don’t know how happy you’re making me, František. I can’t tell you how incomplete I was without you. I’ve been working on this stupid pyramid scheme for four months, and all I could get was a paltry quarter million out of some daft Canadian.”

Jan opened the car door and the two slipped onto the warm back seat. “Well, that will soon change, young man,” František said. “I have only one curious problem…”

“You have a problem?”

“Yes, my problem is that I am a sufferer of visions.”

“You suffer from visions,” Vladimir repeated. “I can recommend a doctor in the States…”

“No, no, no,” František laughed. “I am a sufferer of good visions! For instance, last night I had this dream… I saw a local congress hall being rented out for a caviar brunch… I saw a promotional film about PravaInvest broadcast on a screen of enormous proportions… By morning, I dreamed of twenty such brunches at five hundred persons per brunch. Ten thousand English-speakers, roughly one-third of the present expatriate population. All the children of mamas and papas from happier lands. All potential investors.”

“Aha,” Vladimir said. “I see such wonders as well, but I don’t quite understand how this film will be financed.”

“Now, it is fortunate for you,” said František, “that I have friends in this nation’s vast and underemployed film industry. Furthermore, my chum Jitomir manages a gargantuan conference center in the Goragrad district. As for the caviar, well, I’m afraid you’re on your own regarding the caviar.”

“No problems there!” Vladimir said and he acquainted František with the international caviar-contraband venture the Groundhog’s men had put together. As he divulged the dark and grainy details, the weather outside the car turned fickle, playing first with a palette of loose baby-pink clouds, then clearing the canvas to sear the approaching Golden City with brilliant sunshine. Each brightening and darkening made Vladimir all the more excited, for it confirmed that change was on the way. “Dear God!” he cried. “I believe we are ready to proceed!”

“No, wait,” František said. “That was hardly the sum of my visions,” he said. “I see more. I see us buying an industrial plant. A failed one, of course.”

“There’s one I’ve seen on the outskirts of town,” Vladimir said. “The Future Tek 2000. That one looked like it failed a century ago.”

“Yes, yes. My cousin Stanka bought a piece of the Future Tek. It’s a chemical plant that not only failed a century ago but actually exploded last year. Perfect. I must have supper with Stanka. But I see still more. I see that night club we talked about…”

“I see that, too,” Vladimir said. “We’ll call it the Metamorphosis Lounge in deference to Kafka and his mighty grip on the expatriate imagination. ‘Lounge’ is also a popular word these days.”

“I hear Drum N’ Bass music. I see a soft, fuzzy, highbrow kind of prostitution. I feel something up my nose. Cocaine?”

“Better still,” Vladimir said, “I have learned of a revolutionary new narcotic, a horse tranquilizer, which we can get in bulk by way of a French veterinarian.”

“Vladimir!”

“What? The horse tranquilizer is too outré?”

“No, no…” František’s eyes were still closed; the veins on his forehead were bulging with high concepts. “I see us listed on the Frankfurt Stock exchange!”

“Bozhe moi!”

“I see NASDAQ.”

“God help us.”

“Vladimir, we must act soon. No, forget soon. Today. Right now. This is a magical moment for those of us lucky enough to be in this part of the world, but it is no more than a moment. In three years Prava will be history. The expat crowds will be gone, the Stolovan nation will become a Germany in miniature. Now is the time to be alive, my young friend!”

“Hey, where are you taking me?” Vladimir asked, suddenly aware that they had crossed the New Town and were going to some mysterious burned-out district beyond.

“We’re going to make a movie!” František cried.

VLADIMIR’S FAVORITECold War coincidence? The uncanny similarities between the Soviet architectural style of the eighties and the cardboard sets of Star Trek, the grand American kitsch program of the sixties. Take, for instance, the 1987-built Gorograd District Palace of Trade and Culture which František had procured for his weekly caviar brunches and for screenings of PravaInvest: The Movie. Captain Kirk himself would have felt at home in this giant approximation of a twenty-fifth-century radiator. He would have plopped himself down on one of the orange plastic space chairs, which filled the auditorium’s starry interior, then looked on in exaggerated horror as the enormous viewing screen crackled to life, the voice of a fearsome enemy space creature announcing the following: