Little Failure (24 page)

My parents have taken the big bedroom, where we lie together in their giant shiny mahogany bed as one on weekends and they try to
grab at my circumcised penis to see how it has turned out and if it has grown in accordance with the
All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development. “Dai posmotret’!”
they shout.
Let us see it! What are you ashamed of?
I’m twisting away from them, clutching at my goods, filled to the brim with that stupid new American word:
privacy
. But, also, I have to say, I am excited and happy that they take such an interest in me, even though I know from SSSQ that nobody should touch my
zain
. This much has been explained to us somewhere between Leviticus and Prophets.

And so, privacy. Because there are three bedrooms, and my parents are very pleased with having even one, I am handed over the remaining two. This is also a statement on their part: They love me so much that everything that is in excess to their meager possessions is automatically mine. I would estimate their own entertainment budget during the fiscal years 1979–1985 at about twenty dollars a year, mostly hooks for my father’s fishing stick.

My first bedroom, formerly the apartment’s dining room, covered entirely in cheap wood paneling, is given over to my folding couch, which is itself draped in velvety green-and-yellow stripes, oh-so-soft to the touch. When erect, the couch feels like it could belong in a corporate office of the famous International Business Machines, and when folded open, it feels luxurious beyond belief. Only now do I realize that, minus the polka dots, the couch has the same striped color scheme as the singular shirt I brought with me from Leningrad. Next to the couch is a typewriter stand, and on the stand is an IBM Selectric typewriter that my mother has liberated from her place of work. At first I am not sure what to do with it, but I know that holding the font ball labeled
COURIER 72
is somehow important, and I hold it in both of my hands for quite a while. Between my Courier ball and the
All-Soviet Guide to Boys’ Development
there is a terrible chasm that will take half a lifetime to fill.

On the other side of the couch is the glass-and-mahogany bookcase that is the focal point of every Russian household. This kind of unit
usually goes in the living room where visitors can appraise their hosts and take notes on their intellectual deficiencies. My parents aren’t telling me to become a writer—everyone knows that immigrant children have to go into law, medicine, or maybe that strange new category known only as “computer”—but placing the bookcase in my room sends the unmistakable message that I am our family’s future and that I have to be the best of the best.
Which I will be, Mama and Papa, I swear
.

The bookcase contains the collected works of Anton Chekhov in eight dark blue volumes with the author’s seagull-like signature across every volume’s cover, and most of the collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin. In front of the Russian greats stands a siddur (the Jewish daily prayer book), enclosed in a plastic case and coated with fake silver and fake emeralds. It is written in a language none of us understands, but it is so
holy
that it blocks out the Pushkin that my parents have all but committed to memory. Beneath the siddur, on the inferior shelves, is the small but growing collection of American children’s books that I am now capable of reading. There is the book on how Harriet “Moses” Tubman freed the black people from Maryland, there is a short history of George Washington (how handsome he looks astride his white mare, a real
amerikanets
!), and a book called
The Boy from the UFO
. An unhappy white boy, Barney, who lives with his foster parents meets an alien boy in his backyard and agrees to go back to his home planet. When he finds out he’ll never see his foster parents again, he learns to love them. On the cover is Barney, also very handsome and American in his pretty pajamas on a rooftop that is the personal property of his foster parents (just like we own our roof now!), and a spherical metal container, the UFO, floats promisingly in front of him. I don’t know why, but reading this book makes me cry at night.

Opposite the bed is the closet in which the Lightman with only the white sclera for eyes shares his quarters with my shirt, a V-neck sweater, and a pair of yellowish corduroy pants, part of my Stinky Russian Bear ensemble at SSSQ, wide waled in a style that will make
a confusing comeback when I enroll at Oberlin College less than a decade later.

Lest the reader get the wrong impression, let me say now that I am
agog
with Bedroom Number 1. There is so much happiness here. This is my first stab at keeping and maintaining my own space, even if my father will saunter in without knocking to pick up Dostoyevsky’s
The Insulted and Humiliated
from the bookshelves, and my mother will come over regularly to pet me and make sure I am still alive.

And then, as if that’s not enough, my kingdom extends to Bedroom Number 2. We do not have enough money to furnish this bedroom, but this is when the amazing American curb—the land of miracles—will provide us with another couch, of coarse plaid, upon which we will stick an even coarser red carpet, the kind that used to hang on the wall above my Culture Couch in Leningrad. Eventually we will find a little black-and-white Zenith television in the trash can outside our building, and that will find its pride of place, and when I will grow even older and have access to a Sanyo AM/FM Stereo Cassette Player with Headphones and Anti-Rolling Mechanism I will sit on the coarse Russian carpet covering the coarse American couch and, while listening to Annie Lennox lamenting the weather in “Here Comes the Rain Again,” brood in the singular odorous way of a boy sinking into his teenage years.

Outside our storm windows there is also a new world. Deepdale Gardens must have once been a pretty redbrick maze of two-story buildings and interlocking parking garages, but by 1981 it has all faded to a brownish color. This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition. But at the time all I know is that there are pathways and roundabouts on which I can ride my shitty used bike, and all of this territory belongs to the cooperative and, hence, partly, to me. In fact, there are signs everywhere attesting to the private-property nature of Deepdale Gardens—meaning
It is our complex, so you keep out, mister
.

THIS AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE OF UNIFORMED PATROLS AND CAMERAS
should definitely deter the people who don’t look like us from stealing our fake-jewel-encrusted siddur.

As the evening settles over Deepdale Gardens, my father and I stroll through the courtyards—alive with pansies and hydrangeas and lilies and daisies—like two newly minted lords of the realm. Father is very nice to me on these walks, although sometimes as a joke he likes to sneak up to me and give me a
podzhopnik
, a little side kick in the ass.
Ow, stop it!
I say, but it’s okay because it’s a love kick and he’s not angry, just playful. When he
is
angry, he’ll shake his head and murmur, “
Ne v soldaty, ne v matrosy, ne podmazivat’ kolyosa
”
—
roughly, You won’t make it as a soldier nor a sailor nor a polisher of car tires—which is what Stepfather Ilya, Goebbels to his friends, used to say to him when Papa was growing up in a little village outside Leningrad. I guess I know that what my father means is that I am not good at physical activities such as carrying more than one grocery bag at a time from the Grand Union to his waiting Chevrolet Malibu Classic, but the Russian phrase is so archaic and convoluted that it easily misses its mark. Well of course I won’t be a soldier or a sailor or a gas station attendant. At the very least, I’ll be a corporate lawyer, Papa.

But then there are the good times, when my father will open up the vast larder of his imagination and tell me a story from a long-running series he calls
The Planet of the Yids
(
Planeta Zhidov
). “Please, Papa!” I chant. “
Planet of the Yids! Planet of the Yids!
Tell me!”

In Papa’s telling, the Planet of the Yids is a clever Hebraic corner of the Andromeda Galaxy, constantly besieged by gentile spacemen who attack it with space torpedoes filled with highly unkosher but oh-so-delicious Russian
salo
, which is salted raw pig fat, lard, a lumpy cousin of the French suet. The planet is run by Natan Sharansky, the famous Jewish dissident. But the KGB can’t leave him alone, even though he’s light-years away, and keeps trying to sabotage the planet. And always, just as it seems it’s curtains for the Yids—“the goys have burst through the Shputnik Shield and into the ionosphere!”—the circumcised ones, led by the fearless Captain Igor, manage to outsmart their enemies, à
la the Bible, à la Leon Uris’s
Exodus
, à la us. For this is, of course, our story, and I crave it almost as much as I crave that forbidden
salo
, which you can’t really buy at the Grand Union anyway, almost as much as I crave my father’s love.

We have walked the lengths and breadths of Deepdale Gardens, past the FAA Air Traffic Control Facility down the street with its five skyscraper-sized antennas, past the playground where Papa has let me sink in one basketball more than him to win yet another “close” game, past the hydrangeas of our cooperative Eden, and up the carpeted stairs of 252-67 Sixty-Third Avenue. Since we have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Publishers Clearing House, our mailbox is filled to overflowing with offers from around the country for one S. SHITGABT and his family, not to mention the latest issue of
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
. We won’t bite again, but those bright fat envelopes tell our story, too.

We are living on the Planet of the Yids.

We have already won.

The author in his favorite (and only) shirt pens the masterpiece “Bionic Friends” on an IBM Selectric typewriter. The chair is from Hungary, the couch from Manhattan
.

J
UST BEFORE PUBERTY BEGINS
in earnest, I come down with Dissociative Identity Disorder, evidenced by “The presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states, [with] at least two of these identities or personality states recurrently [taking] control of the person’s behavior” (DSM-5).

At least two?
I’ve got four! To my parents and Grandma Polya I am Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart, disobedient son and beloved grandson, respectfully. Very respectfully. To the American teachers at SSSQ, I am Gary Shteyngart, strange salami-smelling boy with some aptitude at math. To the Hebrew teachers at SSSQ I am Yitzhak Ben Shimon or some shit like that. And to the children, to my fellow pupils in their Macy’s regalia, I am Gary Gnu the Third.

If a psychiatrist had been present (and why the hell wasn’t she present?)
to ask me who I was, undoubtedly I would have answered with my slightly manicured but still thick Russian accent,
Doctor, I am Gary Gnu the Third, ruler of the Holy Gnuish Empire, author of the Holy Gnorah and commander of the Mighty Gnuish Imperial Army
.

How do things come to such a pass?