Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“It’s nice here,” Vladimir said, slipping on the earmuffs, gesturing at the ruined buildings and smoky ravine behind him. “I’m glad I took a walk… I feel much better.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but already his voice was lacking in malice. It was hard to think of a reason to hate her. She had lied to him, yes. She had not trusted him the way lovers sometimes trust one another. And so?

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Morgan said. “I talked with Tomaš.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vladimir said.

“Still, I’d like to apologize…”

Vladimir suddenly reached out and rubbed his hands on her cold cheeks. It was the first contact they had had in hours. He smiled and heard his lips crack. The situation was clear: They were two astronauts on a cold planet. He was, for his part, a gentle dissembler, a dodgy investment guru with his hands in many pockets. She was a terrorist who drove tent stakes into the ground, who cradled mewing stray cats in her arms, not to mention the poor Tomaš. Vladimir was weighing his words to best describe this arrangement, but soon found himself speaking rather indiscriminately. “Hey, you know, I’m proud of you, Morgan,” he said. “This thing, this blowing up the Foot, I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I’m glad you’re not just another Alexandra editing some stupid lit mag with a funky Prava address. You’re like on a… I don’t know… some kind of Peace Corps mission… Except with Semtex.”

“C4,” Morgan corrected him. “And nobody’s going to get hurt, you know. The Foot’s going to—”

“I know, implode. I’m just a little worried about you. I mean, what if they catch you? Can you imagine yourself in a Stolovan jail? You’ve heard the babushka s’ war cry. They’ll send you to the gulag.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes in thought. She rubbed her mittens together. “But I’m an American,” she said. She opened her mouth again, but there was nothing more to say on the subject.

Vladimir absorbed her arrogance and even laughed a little. She was an American. It was her birthright to do as she pleased. “Besides,” Morgan said, “ everybody hates the Foot. The only reason it didn’t get knocked down is because of official corruption. We’re just doing what everyone wants. That’s all.”

Yes, blowing up the Foot was actually democratic. A manifestation of the people’s will. She really was an emissary from that great proud land of cotton gins and habeas corpus. He remembered their first date all those months ago, the eroticism of her snug bathrobe and easygoing ways; once again, he wanted to kiss her mouth, lick the brilliant white pillars of her teeth. “But what if you do get caught?” Vladimir said.

“I’m not the one that’s gonna blow it up,” Morgan said, wiping her teary eyes. “All I’m doing is storing the C4, because my apartment is the last place anyone would look.” She reached over and fixed his earmuffs so that they corresponded directly with his ears. “And what if you get caught?” she said.

“What do you mean?” Vladimir asked. Him? Caught? “You’re talking about this PravaInvest shit?” he said. “It’s nothing. We’re just ripping off a few rich people.”

“It’s one thing to steal from that spoiled Harry Green,” Morgan said, “but getting Alexandra and Cohen hooked on some awful horse drug… that’s fucked up.”

“It’s really that addictive, huh?” Vladimir said. He was heartened by the fact that she was assigning relative values to his misdeeds—drug dealing, bad; investor fraud, less bad. “Well, maybe I should phase that stuff out,” he said. He looked to the overcast skies pondering his horse tranquilizer’s vast profit margins, substituting horse powder for stars.

“And that Groundhog,” Morgan said. “I can’t believe you would want to work for someone like that. There’s, like, nothing redeeming about him.”

“They’re my people,” Vladimir explained to her, holding his hands up to demonstrate the messianic concept of my people. “You have to understand their plight, Morgan. The Groundhog and Lena and the rest of them—it’s as if history’s totally outflanked them. Everything they grew up with is gone. So what are their options now? They can either shoot their way through the gray economy or make twenty dollars a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk.”

“But don’t you find it dangerous to be around maniacs like that?” Morgan asked.

“I suppose,” Vladimir said, enjoying the furrowed look of concern on her face. “I mean there’s this one guy, Gusev, who keeps trying to kill me, but I think I’ve nailed him pretty good for now… You see, I usually whip the Groundhog in the bathhouse with birch twigs… It’s like this ceremonial thing that I do… And Gusev used to… Well, for one thing, Gusev is this murderous anti-Semite—”

He stopped. For a few frozen moments the burden and the limitations of Vladimir’s life seemed to float along on his breath like cartoon captions. By then, they had been standing on the extraterrestrial surface of Planet Stolovaya for over ten minutes with only their earmuffs and mittens providing life support. The wintry landscape and the natural loneliness it engendered was taking its toll; at once, without prompting, Vladimir and Morgan embraced, her ugly peacoat against his fake-fur–collared overcoat, earmuff to earmuff. “Oh, Vladimir,” Morgan said. “What are we going to do?”

A gust of tire-factory smoke disgorged itself from the ravine and took on the shape of a magical jinni just released from his glassy prison. Vladimir pondered her reasonable question, but came up with one of his own. “Tell me,” he said, “why did you like Tomaš?”

She touched his cheek with her arctic nose; he noticed that her proboscis always seemed a bit more globular and full-bodied at night, perhaps the work of shadows and his failing eyesight. “Oh, where do I start?” she said. “For one thing, he taught me everything I know about not being American. We were penpals in college, and I remember he’d send me these letters, these endless letters I could never completely understand, about subjects I knew nothing about. He wrote me poems with titles like ‘On the Defacement of the Soviet Rail Workers’ Mural at the Brezhnevska Metro Station.’ I guess I took Stolovan and history classes just to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And then I landed in Prava and he met me at the airport. I can still remember that day. He looked absolutely hopeless with that sad face of his. Hopeless and darling and also like he desperately needed me to touch him and to be close with a woman… You know, sometimes that’s a good thing, Vladimir, to be with a person like that.”

“Hmm…” Vladimir decided that he had heard just about enough on the subject of Tomaš. “And what about me—” he started to say.

“I liked that poem you read at the Joy,” Morgan said, kissing his neck with her glacial lips. “About your mother in Chinatown. You know what my favorite line was? ‘Simple pearls from her birthland… Around her tiny freckled neck.’ It was awesome. I can totally see your mother. She’s like this tired Russian woman and you love her even though you’re so different from her.”

“It was a stupid poem,” Vladimir said. “A throwaway poem. I have very complicated feelings for my mother. That poem was just bullshit. You have to be very careful, Morgan, not to fall in love with men who read you their poetry.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Morgan said. “It was nice. And you were right when you said that you and Tomaš and Alpha had a lot in common. Because you do.”

“I had meant that in an abstract sense,” Vladimir said, thinking of Tomaš’s psoriasis-scarred face.