Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“In its six years of existence, PravaInvest, s.r.o., has become, by far, the leading corporate entity to arise from the rubble of the former Soviet Bloc. How did we do it? Good question.”

So now the truth would be revealed!

“ Talent.We’ve united seasoned professionals from industrialized Western nations with bright and eager young specialists from Eastern Europe.”

There they were: Vladimir and an African actor in a golf cart, swinging by an enormous white wall on which the words FutureTek 2000 were printed in futuristic corporate script. The wall ended and the golf cart pulled into a grassy field where happy workers of many ethnicities and sexual orientations cavorted beneath an ever-rising inflatable phoenix, PravaInvest’s rather shameless corporate symbol.

“ Diversity of interests:From modernizing film studios in Uzbekistan to our brand-new high-technology industrial park and convention centre—the Future Tek 2000—coming soon to the Stolovan capital, PravaInvest has left no market uncornered.”

How about those Uzbek film studios! And the scale model of the tree-lined FutureTek campus, that postindustrial Taj Mahal!

“ A Forward-Looking Mentality.Have we mentioned the Future Tek 2000? Of course! The vanguard of technology is the only place to be whether you’re running a modern high-rise hotel in the Albanian capital of Tirana, a vocational school for the Yupik Eskimo in Siberia, or a small but consequential literary magazine in Prava. And PravaInvest’s ideals are as solid as our reputation for prudent investment. We’re committed to building lasting peace in the Balkans, cleaning up the Danube, and issuing the most exceptional dividends to our investors. We have our cake and eat it too, every single day. ”

Before a Bosnian was shown eating his torte, and after the Yupik Eskimo waved to the camera with their T-squares and protractors, Cohen and Alexandra were caught leaning over Cagliostro proofs engaged in heated (and, thankfully, silent) discussion. The camera made Cohen seem fat and thirtyish, while Alexandra, with her round face and dark curving lashes, looked positively Persian. A great cheer greeted the literary pair, a cheer that extended way beyond the Crowd (gorging itself on caviar in the first row) to all the youthful precincts in the auditorium. Even Morgan—her relationship with Vladimir still choppy and unsettled—looking tonight like a bored young embassy wife stuck in some Kinshasa or Phnom Penh, had to pick up her hands and clap at the image of her dear friend Alexandra. Yes, Cagliostro had been a stroke of genius, a marketing tool to be studied at Wharton. Too bad the damn thing still didn’t exist.

“So what are you waiting for? Shares of PravaInvest stock have been circulating on the Tanzanian stock exchange at approximately U.S. $920 per share. We are now pleased to offer them for nearly half the price in an effort to ‘give something back’ to those who have enabled our meteoric rise: the residents of the former Warsaw Pact. For information on our current schedule of dividends please call Vladimir Girshkin, Executive Vice President, at our Prava headquarters: tel. (0789) 02 36 21 59 / fax 02 36 21 60. Or call his associate František Kral at (0789) 02 33 65 12. Both are fluent in English and more than happy to assist you.

“Now it’s your turn to GIVE SOMETHING BACK! PravaInvest, s.r.o.”

MEANWHILE,courtesy of the poet Fish, a package arrived from Lyon containing twenty vials of liquid horse tranquilizer, cooking instructions for transformation of said into snorting powder, and the most God-awful poetry to appear in an Alaskan literary journal. Vladimir took this loot to Marusya and explained the situation to her. She shook her balding head as if to say, “Nu, what’s in it for me?” Vladimir knew it wasn’t a matter of her antidrug principles. She tended to the opium garden with loving grace and surely skimmed off the top both in the garden and at her little concession stand. Hell, by nine in the morning when Vladimir went off for his jog with Kostya (Vladimir looking as cheerless as a conscript in a labor brigade), old Marusya was already tweaked enough to fumble on the obligatory dobry den’.

So a hard-currency compromise was reached, and Marusya, limping ahead like a blighted hobbit, took him down to the main building’s basement where several gas-fired stoves were lined in a row awaiting some devious purpose. They didn’t have to wait long. Inside their cracked ceramic interiors, the liquid horse tranquilizer was cooked at a tremendous temperature in an assortment of pots and pans. Once cooked, Marusya would flip the resulting wafer as gingerly as if it were a blin and set it to cool on a metal tray. Afterward, she’d go at it with a mallet until the wafer was reduced to a small mountain of snortable powder, which she would wrap into a little cellophane log and set out for Vladimir’s inspection. This she did while beaming with the pride of workmanship, her mouthful of gold teeth gleaming in the basement’s dusty air.

Vladimir assembled a nice stack of the little tranquilizer logs, although for the time being he didn’t know where to push them, what the right segue would be for offering up the fifteen-minute lobotomies to the Crowd and beyond. For that he would need his club, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

MC PAAVO ARRIVEDa few days hence on a little turbo-prop bearing the Finnish cross on its tail. He couldn’t shut up even before he got off the plane. They heard his deep voice knocking about in the cabin while they waited on the tarmac: “MC Paavo in de haus! In de pan-European ’hood! Got de Helsinki beat, y’all can’t fuck wif!”

He was no older than František, only he hadn’t kept well at all: wrinkles carved deep to the order of the San Andreas Fault, a hairline in recession and not in the graceful arc of male-pattern baldness, but instead a jagged line, like soldiers beating a piecemeal retreat from the front. To maintain his youth he jabbered like a fifteen-year-old on crack, and sniffed at his armpits as if a great youthful elixir flowed from each. The Finn, only marginally tall, hugged František, ruffled his hair, and called him “My boy-ee,” while the former socialist globetrotter, unfamiliar with hip-hop expressions but never one to be left out, responded with “My girl,” and here the hilarity crested for a bit.

They took Paavo to the Kasino, where he dropped to his knees and crawled about a bit, citing amps and wattage and other technical specifications lost on our Soviet-bloc friends. “Great,” he said. “Knock out the two floors above and we ready to start pumpin.’”

This request actually gave Gusev’s men something constructive to do: They went after the glue-and-cardboard floors with electric staple-guns and machetes, with axes and grenade launchers, with protective goggles and a Russian’s unshakable hope that from destruction the Lord will create anew. By the time they were finished, not only the two floors above the Kasino were removed, but a skylight was knocked through the sixth floor as well. Vladimir, a resident of the Kasino building, found himself temporarily homeless, forced either to squat in Morgan’s pad or take a room at the Intercontinental. Despite his problems with Morgan, he resigned himself to the former.

The Russians’ hopes of providence, however, were not entirely unfounded. The Lord didn’t provide, but Harold Green did. The Canadian’s funds paid for a gorgeous, loopy discorama flanked by enough theme lounges to keep the saddest drunk happy. It was christened, as we already know, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

A NIGHT TOremember at the Metamorphosis Lounge? Good luck. You’ll need three omniscient narrators to cobble together half a narrative. But, what the hell, let’s try to maintain some dignity and recall what happened on night X, hour Y, in the main room, the Kafka Insecuritorium.