Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“It was my major in the Midwestern col—”

“Then please follow me.”

“But, of course, whatever you’re thinking is madness…” Vladimir started to say, but in the meantime he followed the madman faithfully to the front of the room. A flawless hush settled over the congregation, well-trained after forty years of marching happily into the future and never bowing to facts.

With arms swinging in martial fashion and chin set firm, František mounted the podium. “Dear friends of Glorious October,” he said in perfect Russian. “We have a guest today the caliber of which we have not seen since that Bulgarian with the funny parrot last year… Yezdinsky, was it? Only thirty years old, but already thrice a Hero of Socialist Labor, not to mention the youngest person ever to receive the Order of Andropov for Heroic Operation of a Wheat Combine… Comrades, please welcome the General Secretary of the Central Presidium of the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists and a serious contender for Russia’s presidency in the next election… Comrade Yasha Oslov!”

The geezers rose to their feet in an enormous polyester wave, cheering “Hurrah, Trotsky!” even though Vladimir’s alias had by now been established. Noticing his injuries, some of the grandmas were shouting: “What ails you, Trotsky? We’ll fix you up!”

Vladimir waved to them solicitously as he climbed the stairs, nearly losing his fragile balance in the act. He set his briefcase full of greenbacks on top of the lectern and adjusted the microphone with his working hand, waiting for the applause to subside. “Stalwart comrades,” he shouted and immediately stopped. Stalwart comrades… Um, and then what? “First let me ask you, is it acceptable that I speak in Russian?”

“But of course! Speak, Russian eagle!” the audience said as one.

My kind of audience, Vladimir thought. He breathed in all his doubts once, felt the pain of breathing, then dispelled them into the air, thick with the smell of groceries going bad and cheap suits worn on a warm day. “Stalwart comrades!” he shouted into the silence. “Outside it is a warm April day, the sky is clear. But over the mausoleum of Vladimir Ilych,” he turned for emphasis to the statue of Lenin, “the sky is a perpetual gray!”

“Woe, poor Lenin!” moaned the crowd. “Poor are his heirs.”

“Poor, indeed,” Vladimir said. “Just look what has happened to your beautiful Red Prava. Americans everywhere you turn! (The crowd roared its opposition!) Performing lewd sexual acts on the Emanuel Bridge as if to laugh at the sanctity of the Socialist Family and to spread their AIDS! (Roar!) Shooting up their marijuana with dirty needles in the Old Town Square, where once a hundred thousand comrades thrilled to the words of Jan Zhopka, your first working-class president. (Roar! Roar!) Is this why for forty years you have toiled in the fields and melted all that metal… melted all that metal into steel, built those wonderful trams, a subway system that is the envy of the Paris Métro, public toilets everywhere… And let’s not forget the human element! How many faithful, energetic young comrades have we produced, like Comrade František here…”

He waved to František in the front row and presented the crowd with both an upturned thumb and a victory sign (he wasn’t about to skimp on them). “Franti!” cheered the crowd.

“Yes, Comrade Franti has been dispensing Red Justice since he was in diapers! Keep beating up that counter-revolutionary element with your mighty pen, dear friend!” Oh, he was starting to like this! He paced before the lectern like an agitated Bolshevik, even touching the cool marble of the Big Daddy of the Revolution for support. “Look at my hand!” he shouted, waving the bandaged package in the air with his other hand. “Look what they’ve done to it, the industrialists! I spoke my mind at a rally of Negro workers in Washington, and the CIA put it through a meat grinder!”

At the mention of the meat grinder, a comrade in a frumpy mink and floral headscarf could no longer contain herself. She sprang to her feet and waved a segmented string of sausages around her head, lasso-style. “I paid forty crowns for these!” she shouted. “What do you think of that?”

“Yes,” the crowd picked up the rallying cry. “What do you think of that?”

“What do I think of that?” Vladimir pointed to himself as if he were surprised that they would solicit his opinion. “I think that the store owner responsible for charging forty crowns for those sausages should be shot!”

The entire crowd was now on its feet; its ovation must have been heard over at the restaurant next door. “I think his family should be forced to leave Prava as enemies of the people,” shouted the incorrigible Vladimir, “and his children never allowed to attend university!” Hurrah! answered the crowd.

“His cat should be turned into cat food!” Hurrah!

“And what do you think of twenty crowns for a carp?” another inquisitive babushka wanted to know.

“Disgrace! Why have we let the labor camps of Siberia go idle? And what about those nice Stolovan uranium mines? Comrades, when the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists takes control, these new entrepreneurs will really have their work cut out for them!”

The crowd lapsed into cheerful laughter and applause, gold teeth sparkled across the room, and more than one hand reached to calm the overexcited beating of a faulty heart. “We will take care of them one by one, dear tovarishchii. We will strangle the life out of them with our own bare hands, those fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits!”

Now, what can one say about coincidences? Either one believes in a higher power or one just shrugs. Looking back, Vladimir would concede that at that moment he was tempted to believe, for no sooner had the words “fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits” escaped his mouth, than the Groundhog parted the velvet curtain and burst into the room, trailed closely by Gusev and the Log. Yes, they all had on their Armani pinstripes and were looking more porcine than ever, although perhaps the power of suggestion played some part in that.

“There they are!” shouted Vladimir, pointing, he thought, directly into the Groundhog’s solar plexus. “They’ve come to disrupt our dignified meeting! For the honor of the Fatherland, tear those pigs to shreds!”

The Groundhog tilted his head and sucked in his cheeks in amazement, as if to say, “Et tu, Brute?” Then an enormous kielbasa landed on his head and the crowd charged.

Vladimir did not witness all the weapons at their disposal, suffice to say crutches played a big part, but for him the most enduring scene of the melee, like war footage that gets played over and over again on the networks, was the sight of a plump matron in heels stabbing at Gusev’s heart with the business end of a sturgeon, shouting: “Is that hard enough for you, you crook?” while her confused victim pleaded for mercy.

And so, as old soldiers heaved metal chairs against the intruders, and sausages circled overhead like Sikorsky choppers, František hurried Vladimir toward an alternate exit to the embankment. “Brilliant!” was the single word he said, as he pushed him out into the noon light and slammed the door shut behind him.

Still full of revolutionary fervor, but now reminded of more pressing matters, Vladimir ran down the embankment chasing a departing taxi. “Halt, comrade!” he was shouting out of habit.

The taxi squealed in compliance and Vladimir heaved himself inside with a crack of something internal. “Oh, for the love of God…” He sneezed, and two gushers of blood were released, one per nostril, the way one imagines a winning racehorse lets out fire at the finish line.