Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Vladimir moved a fraction so that the apple rolled off the side of the bed and sent Kostya scrambling. He wanted to be surrounded by friends, not by the man who had trained his body for eight months only to allow for its destruction within minutes. “Tell the Groundhog to forget it,” Vladimir said. “I will have nothing more to do with this organization. I am leaving the country. And you better get out of this business as well, before they nail you to the cross like your friend there.”

“Please don’t talk like that, Vladimir,” Kostya said, polishing the apple with renewed vigor. He looked very Western these days in his tattersall Brooks Brothers shirt and tan chinos, but his frightened eyes reminded Vladimir of an old, toothless peasant, the kind he had only seen in picture books of Russia. “Now is the time to renew faith, not deny it,” Kostya was saying. “And I wouldn’t think of leaving the country if I were you. The Groundhog will certainly not allow it. There’s a guard outside the room and the front and back entrances to the hospital are also guarded. I’ve seen it myself, Vladimir. They won’t let you go. Have an apricot, please…”

“I will call the American embassy!” Vladimir said. “I am still an American citizen. I know my rights.”

Kostya looked at him askance. “That will only create problems, don’t you think?” He said this a little too forcefully, without his usual pious restraint, leaving Vladimir, for the first time, in question of his allegiances. “Besides, there’s no phone in this room. Now, here, let me get the curtains. What an astoundingly beautiful day it is outside. If only you could go for a walk.”

“Please get out,” Vladimir said. “You and your fucking religion, and this fruit… What am I supposed to do with all this fruit?”

“Vladimir!” Kostya pressed the apple to his heart. “Say no more! God can only forgive so much! Cross yourself!”

“Jews don’t cross themselves,” Vladimir said. “We’re the ones that put Him up there in the first place, remember?” He single-handedly drew the rank bed sheets over his head, a painful maneuver that brought to fore the sum of his injuries. “Now get out!” he said from beneath his linen fortress.

A DAY PASSEDinto night, then the situation was reversed.

A young Slovak nurse, her eyes and hair dark like a gypsy’s, came to administer painkillers every couple of hours or so; to return the favor, Vladimir let her eat Kostya’s fruit. This nurse was as sturdy as a sausage. She flipped Vladimir over without a sigh, mindful of his fractures, then pressed the needle deep into his rear, a pain Vladimir had come to enjoy as it signified the onset of sweet giddiness.

With an entire socialist pharmacopoeia coasting through his veins, Vladimir spent his days either laughing maniacally as he tried to build an airplane out of the institutional wax paper, or, when the effects of the drugs were at their nadir, dolefully mooing to a bedside picture of Morgan, whose four-hour daily visits were obviously not enough. The times in-between he spent chattering away to himself in both Russian and English, chronicling his childhood and the end of his childhood, often pretending there was a bevy of grandchildren, small and furry, surrounding his bedside. “And when I was your age, Sari, I lived with a dominatrix in a condemned Alphabet City flat. Later, she went with my best friend Baobab, but by this time I was already a mafioso in Prava. What a business!”

But soon enough, in a week, say, Vladimir’s grandchildren became tall and beefy, their features lightened, the tips of their noses curled upward, and sweatshirts with the names of American sports teams suddenly appeared. Vladimir guessed at their lineage. He knew he was reaching some sort of a decision.

“It’ll be the perfect place to recover,” Morgan said. “You’ll see where I was brought up, the real America. And Cleveland’s so nice in the summer. And it doesn’t smell at all anymore—they’ve cleaned up the Cuyahoga River. And if you want, my father can give you a job. And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.” She lowered her voice: “By the way, Tomaš and I are almost finished with our work here. Just so you know…”

“Let me think about it,” Vladimir said, even as a whiff of hardy Midwestern air wormed its way through the shut windows.

And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.

The next day an adventuresome Vladimir ate a dish of soggy dumplings along with a trace of gulash minus the paprika (for health reasons, according to his doctor). He was able to flip himself over for the nurse, who said several encouraging words in her language, then slapped his butt kindly.

The nurse brought in copies of the Prava-dence, and here Vladimir could not escape Cohen’s raging commentaries about anti-Semitism and racism in Mittel Europa, in response to which Cohen was speedily organizing a march to the Old Town Square under the banner EXPATRIATES, LET YOUR DISGUST BE KNOWN! Swastikas would be burned, folk music played, and the Mourner’s Kaddish recited by a visiting dignitary for “a certain fallen friend.”

“But I’m not dead,” Vladimir reminded him when Cohen arrived along with František.

“No, no,” Cohen mumbled. “Although…” He did not elaborate, but instead blotted at his red eyes with both palms, creasing the unshaven portion of his face below. “Let’s have a beer,” he said and took out a bottle, which, with a great deal of clumsiness and running foam, he eventually uncapped and placed in Vladimir’s good hand.

The beer did not seem like a good idea to Vladimir, what with all the exotic drugs pumped into his posterior, but he took a few sips nonetheless. Over the course of the past nine months he had shared so many beers with Cohen that drinking this final one was akin to a memorial, and looking now at his haggard friend brimming once again with righteous energy, Vladimir was sad to think they might never see one another again. “Well, I hope your march goes as well as your work on Cagliostro, ” Vladimir said. “You have a knack for these things, Perry. I’m glad you were my mentor.”

“I know, I know,” Cohen said, brushing it off, embarrassed.

“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to help me to my feet.”

They looped their arms under his shoulders, and with František’s considerable heft accounting for most of the propulsion, lifted him off the bed while he grunted and said “Ach!” On his feet, he was quickly impressed by his mobility. The feet were, with the exception of a few bruises, remarkably undamaged. His attackers had obviously been more concerned with juicier areas and most of the fractures were concentrated among his ribs, which made him feel as if his torso was a package bulging with broken glass. When he held his posture erect and did not breathe excessively, he could commute from the bed to the door easily, but any time his locomotion required a shift of the body or an extended inhalation, things got a little blurry and dark at the edges.

“I’m ready to leave,” Vladimir told them.

Cohen instantly voiced his intention of staying and fighting until every young man with a shaved head was tied up for nine hours and forced to sit through a screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but František merely shook his head (his eyes, too, now had a hard look and were ringed underneath) and said: “Perhaps you are not aware of the situation outside. The guard here and the two guards by the entrance.”

Vladimir turned to František and spread out his good hand, palm-upward, in the famous “Nu?” gesture.

“Nu?” František said. “What can I do? You understand now what our adversaries are capable of.” Then he sighed tremendously. But as the sigh exhausted itself, his face took on the pleased, royal appearance of Son of Apparatchik II. “All right, I see something, yes… But perhaps we should wait until your physique improves.”