Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Vladimir turned to the main lookout tower, the direction from which the trains came with so much of their human freight already perished, from Bucharest and Budapest, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Warsaw and Cracow, Bratislava and… could it be?… Prava. His golden Prava. The city that had treated his ailing ego as kindly as the springs of Karlsbad once treated gout. Get out! But how? And to what salvation? He thought of Grandma, forty years after Stalin died, huddled over volume seven of the Social Security Regulations with sleepless eyes, her magnifying glass at the ready, trying to figure out the meaning of “residual functional capacity.”

Oh, to hell with this twentieth century that was almost at an end, with all its problems still intact and flourishing, and the Girshkins, once again, the brunt of the joke, the epicenter of the storm, the clearinghouse for global confusion and uncertainty. To hell with… Vladimir heard the singular sound of a zoom lens extending behind him and then the snap of a shutter. He turned. Behind him the tour group was paces away. A ruddy-cheeked middle-aged woman, as tall, thin, and neatly groomed as the poplars that surrounded Birkenau, was scrambling to deposit her camera into her crowded handbag, her eyes darting everywhere except in the direction of Vladimir. She had taken a picture of him!

The rest of the Germans also skirted the ground with their light-hued eyes, some glancing back at the offending photographer with likely malice. Amazingly, most of them looked to be in their seventies—large and healthy, with becoming wrinkles and just the perfect white cardigan sweaters for an informal afternoon—that is to say, they were old enough to have been in Birkenau in a different capacity some half a century ago. Should Vladimir, then, have spread out his chest, raised his head high to show off his dark Semitic curls, and then have said to them with a sardonic smile, “Cheese?”

No, leave such gestures to the Israelis. Our Vladimir could only smile shyly as the Germans approached, his shoulders hunched forward submissively, the way his parents had once approached the sour-pussed immigration officials at JFK.

Their tour guide was a handsome young man not much older than Vladimir although certainly younger-looking. He wore his thick hair long, and the granny-glasses lost amid his square, salubrious face likely contained plain, noncurative glass. There were pockets of loose flesh around his still-muscular chest and belly, giving the impression of a strapping country youth idled by a string of poor harvests. That was, in fact, the impression he gave Vladimir: a sensitive provincial man who had learned of liberalism and the German debt from a galvanic local teacher, a hippie from the time when hippies held sway over the land, and now he had himself joined the progressive ranks and took the blighted older generations to see the handiwork of their times. What a concept, thought Vladimir, neither impressed nor appalled.

His eyes met those of the tour guide who smiled and nodded as if this meeting had been prearranged. “Hi,” he said to Vladimir, his voice trembling even for the duration of that minuscule syllable.

“Hello,” Vladimir said. He brought up his hand in a formal gesture of greeting. He tried to recall instantly what it meant to look “grave,” but knew he couldn’t pull it off on the spot, not with the tumult of the past few days under his belt. He continued with his shit-eating grin.

“Hello,” answered the tour guide as he filed past Vladimir. His elderly charges followed. With the ice seemingly broken by their leader, they were now able to look Vladimir briefly in the eye and even manage a little sympathetic smile. Only the middle-aged woman, the one who had dared to photograph Vladimir, the Live Jew of Birkenau, had increased her pace while staring resolutely ahead.

Thank you, come again, Vladimir thought to say, but instead he sighed, looked once more at the departing mane of the thoughtful young tour guide—his better in every aspect, despite the rotting branches of the German’s family tree—and considered yet again his own relative loss of place in this world; his irrevocable perdition.

Ah, and where now, Vladimir Borisovich?

He began his long, pensive trudge to the pond of human ashes, where his friends were already waiting for him, Cohen aghast by both the tour group and the ashes, Morgan solely by the ashes. Perhaps she could get Tomaš and Alpha to blow up the remains of Birkenau as well. Just a few more kilos of C4 and they could really take care of history.

And then his mobile phone rang.

“Well, well,” said the Groundhog.

“Please don’t kill me,” Vladimir blurted out.

“Kill you?” The Groundhog laughed. “Kill my clever goose? Oh, please, friend. We all knew what kind of character you were from the start. Anyone who can bamboozle half of America can surely fuck over my old man.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Vladimir whimpered. “I love your father. I love—”

“Okay, can you please shut up,” the Groundhog moaned. “All is forgiven, just stop crying. Now, I need you back in Prava. We’ve got a strange new scheme going here.”

“Scheme,” Vladimir mumbled. What the hell was going on in the Hog’s little mind? “A strange new scheme…”

“Strange precisely because it isn’t a scheme. A legitimate venture,” the Groundhog explained. “A brewery in South Stolovaya that looks ready to expand into West European and American markets.”

“Legitimate venture,” Vladimir repeated. His mind was barely functioning. “Did Kostya advise you of this?”

“No, no, it’s all me,” the Groundhog said. “And you can’t let anyone know about this, not even Kostya. Especially about the fact that it’s aboveboard. I don’t want to be a laughingstock.” He then invited Vladimir to come out the following week and look over the brewery. “Without your professional opinion no venture can be consummated,” he said. “Legitimate or otherwise.”

“I will never betray you again,” Vladimir whispered.

The Groundhog laughed once more, a soft chortle far removed from his usual boisterous braying. Then he hung up.

ON THE WAYto the southern brewery their caravan had passed seemingly the entire unremarkable oeuvre of the Stolovan landscape. Only one mountain, a compact trapezoid indistinguishable from its neighbors, drew Vladimir’s attention, for Jan announced in a proud, instructive tone that this was the mountain on which the Stolovan nation had originated. Vladimir was impressed. What a comfort to know the mountain from which your kind had once come hollering down! He imagined that if the Russians had had such a mountain it would be a great, sweeping Everest out in the Urals on which a military surveillance base would promptly be built, its RKO-style antennas arching into the heavens, announcing that the sons and daughters of the Kievan Rus had laid claim to the taiga and its grizzly bears, the Baikal and its sturgeons, the shtetl and its Jews.

The only other point of interest on their way to the brewery was a half-built nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town, its cooling towers rising over a vast field of failing carrots in long spirals of unfinished skeletal grating, as if the meltdown had already occurred.

The brewery town itself was a charmless little burg where the steeples of Gothic churches, the mansions of the leading merchants, indeed the town square itself had long been cleared away for a claustrophobic quadrant of graying buildings, each nearly identical, even if one was a hotel, the other an administrative center, the third a hospital. They drove straight to the hotel, its lobby a furry seventies affair crammed with prickly recliners, stale air, naked legs, and, in an homage to the leading employer of the locality, a sparkling vat of the local beer rising out of the shag carpeting like a lone Easter Island–head statue. But upstairs, in the Executive Wing (as the rooms with the brass doorknobs were designated), Vladimir felt a thrill of apparatchik camaraderie—these rust-colored, bric-a-brac-less quarters surely must have housed their share of Light Bulb Factory #27 directors and similar happy-go-lucky communist officials. If only František was here!