Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

He had forgotten Baobab’s number, although once it was etched into his memory along with his social security number—both were now casualty to the passage of time and the efficacy of Stolovan spirits. The only connection he was still capable of making across the Atlantic was to Westchester, and for that, too, the time had come.

Mother, woken up from her deep weekend slumber, could only conjure up her requisite “Bozhe moi!”

“Mother,” said Vladimir, amazed at how superfluous that word had become to his insane life, when only three years ago it had prefaced nearly every utterance.

“Vladimir, get out of Prava now!”

How did she know he had moved to Prava? “Pardon—”

“Your friend Baobab called. The Italian boy. I could not understand him, he is beyond understanding, but you are obviously in danger…” She paused to catch her breath. “Something about a fan, a man with a fan, he’s determined to murder you and Russians are involved. Your dimwitted friend has been trying to reach you frantically and so have I, but the operator in Prava knows nothing of you, as can be expected…”

“The man with the fan,” Vladimir said. He had wanted to say Fan Man, but it could not be said in Russian precisely that way. “Rybakov?”

“That is what I think he said. You must call him right now. Or better yet, get on the next plane out of Prava. You can even charge the ticket to my American Express account. It’s that important!”

“I’m not in Prava,” Vladimir said. “I’m in London.”

“London! Bozhe moi! Every Russian mafioso has a flat in London now. So it’s just like I suspected… Oh, Vladimir, please come back home, we won’t make you go to law school, I promise. You can live in the house and do whatever you want, I can get you a promotion at the resettlement agency, now that I’m on the board. And, this may come as a pleasant surprise, but we’ve put away a nice sum of money in the past ten years. We must have, I don’t know… Two, three, fourteen million dollars. We can afford to give you a little stipend, Vladimir. Maybe five thousand a year plus subway tokens. You can live at home and do whatever it is you young, listless people do. Smoke pot, paint, write, whatever they taught you at that fucking liberal arts school, devil confound all those hippies. Just please come back, Vladimir. They’ll kill you, those Russian animals! You’re such a weak, helpless boy, they’ll wrap you in a blin and have you for supper.”

“Okay, calm down, stop crying. Everything is fine. I’m safe in London.”

“I’m not crying,” Mother said. “I’m too agitated to cry!” But then she broke down and started weeping with such force that Vladimir put down the phone and turned to Morgan, her form stirring beneath the blankets in response to the loudness and urgency of his voice.

“I will call Baobab now,” he said quietly, “and if there’s truly danger, then I’ll be on the next plane to the States. I know what to do, Mother. I’m not stupid. I’ve become a very successful businessman in Prava. I was just about to send you a brochure of my new investment group.”

“A businessman without an M.B.A.,” sniffled Mother. “We all know what kind of businessman that is.”

“Did you hear what I said, Mother?”

“I hear you, Vladimir. You’ll call Baobab—”

“And I’m going to be perfectly safe. Forget about this being-eaten-in-a-blin business. Such nonsense! All right? I’m dialing Baobab now. Good-bye…”

“Vladimir!”

“What?”

“We still love you, Vladimir… And…”

“And?”

“…And your grandmother died two weeks ago.”

“Babushka?”

“Your father nearly had a nervous collapse between her death and your stupidity. He’s upstate right now, recovering with his fishing. The medical practice is losing money, but what can you do in such a situation? I had to let him go upstate.”

“My grandmother…” Vladimir said.

“…has left for the other world,” Mother completed. “They had her on the tubes for a few weeks, but then she died fast. Her face looked like she was in pain when she lapsed into a coma, but the doctors said that it didn’t necessarily mean she was suffering.”

Vladimir leaned himself against the cold window. Grandmother. Running after him with her fruit and farmer cheese at their old mountain dacha . “Volodechka! Essen! ” That crazed, dear woman. To think that now the rectangle that had been his family had suddenly, with the subtraction of a single, flat EKG line, been reconfigured into a tiny triangle. To think there were only three Girshkins left. “The funeral?” Vladimir asked.

“Very nice, your father cried an ocean. Listen, Vladimir, get on the phone with Baobab already. Your grandmother was old, life for her was not life anymore, especially with you gone from it. Oh, how she loved you… So, just say a prayer for her soul, and for your father, too, and for my suffering heart, and for this whole wretched family of ours on which the Lord has chosen to heap only calamity these past two quarters… Now go!”

IT TOOK TWELVErings but finally the tired, husky voice came on, sounding as unhappy as a government worker caught at his desk immediately after the five o’clock bell. “Baobab residence.”

“Is there a Baobab I could speak to?” Vladimir said. His friend’s demented greeting made him smile. Baobab remained Baobab.

“It’s you! Where are you? Never mind! Turn on CNN! Turn on CNN! It’s starting already! Jesus Christ!”

“What the hell are you yelling about? Why does it always have to be hysteria. Why can’t we have a normal—”

“That friend of yours with the fans, the one we had the citizenship for.”

“How now?”

“He barged into Challah’s, into your old apartment last week. He woke us up—”

“Us?”

Baobab sighed a long, pneumatic sigh. “After you left, Roberta married Laszlo,” he explained with aggravated patience. “They went to Utah to unionize the Mormons. So… I guess… Challah and I were both lonely…”

“That’s great!” Vladimir said. With all of his selfish little heart he wished them the best. Even the idea of them having sex, the tremor of their two large bodies shaking the already shaky foundations of Alphabet City, inspired in Vladimir only joy. Good for them! “But what did Rybakov want?”

“Dah! It’s starting! It’s starting! Turn it on! Turn it on!”

“What’s starting?”

“CNN, idiot!”

Vladimir tiptoed his way into the living room, where the enormous black monolith that was the television had already been set to the news channel. He could hear the newscaster even before the picture materialized, the words Breaking News—New York’s Mayoralty in Crisis floating along the bottom of the screen.

“… Aleksander Rybakov,” the newscaster was saying in midsentence. “But to most people, he is simply… The Fan Man.” The reporter was an unsmiling young woman in a provincial tweed suit, hair tied into a painful bun, teeth buffed into a reflective sheen. “We were first introduced to the Fan Man three months ago,” she continued, “when his many letters to the New York Times lambasting New York’s urban decay came to the attention of the city’s mayor.”

“Aaah!” Vladimir shouted. So he’d done it. He’d finally done it, that grizzly old loon.

Shot of a gilded banquet room, the mayor—a tall man with a square-set face that even two powerful jaws could not stretch into a smile—standing next to a hysterically grinning Rybakov, looking slim and polished in a three-piece banker’s suit. Above them a banner read: NEW YORK CELEBRATES THE NEWEST NEW YORKERS.