Russian Debutante's Handbook (15 page)

“One should not even compare,” Vladimir said, watching Grandmother wheel herself toward the table then spin around midyard to mind her defenseless oak trees.

“Then will you make a home with her?” his father asked. “No, I think not,” he answered the question himself. “It’s never too wise to settle down with any one woman so early in life. You know, when I was a young student at Leningrad State, I had my own apartment on the embankment of the River Moika, a prime spot for lechery. And so, at all times of the day, women fellow-students would make their way across the Palace Bridge to spend some time with your father. I was well known, a popular Jew.” He looked up to the heavens dimming above, as if his past life continued in some parallel universe.

“But the best, I’ll tell you, was when we were sent to work the collective farms during summer breaks. We were all put in freight cars, the women and men in the same cars, mind you! It took three or four days to get to the farms and so the pissing and the shitting was done right out the freight doors. You would be sitting, talking with your chums, when all of a sudden, to your left, a beautiful, round bottom would come out to do the most intimate of business. And some of these women were big and blond, you know, the Slavs! Not that there’s anything wrong with our own Jewish types, but, oh, when you found these women all alone in the middle of a hayfield and you’d say, ‘Excuse me, I would like to make your acquaintance, comrade so-and-so!’ You’d both be sweaty and shitty and drunk, but the fresh young sex out in the fields was sublime.”

He jumped up suddenly and said, “Flounder,” then rushed off to the kitchen. Vladimir chewed on the heel of the bread loaf and helped himself to vodka. He waved to Grandma, who shouted back something indecipherable and, using both of her frail arms, attempted to return the wave.

His father emerged with a sizzling pan and tossed mangled bits of flounder onto both of their plates; the art of filleting had never found favor with the doctor. “So what’s the money for?” asked his father. “You must buy this woman little gifts, the garbage women like?”

“No, it’s not that,” Vladimir said. “She enjoys having a good time. She doesn’t expect me to pay for her, but I have to pay for myself at least.” He neglected to mention that he had been adopted by the Ruoccos. One family at a time.

“I don’t know about this one,” Dr. Girshkin said, stuffing his face with fish and stir-fried cabbage. “Challatchka was so nice and quiet. You could survive on your pauper’s salary with her. But maybe this one will make you reconsider your priorities. I’m sure you know you have the smarts to make a lot of money in this country. And through honest work, not like . . .”

“I consider what you do honest work,” said Vladimir, who at one point in Hebrew school had had a long argument with himself concerning the morality of his father’s medical enterprise. The argument had been decided in his father’s favor, although the reasoning was laced with Talmudisms intricate enough for Vladimir to lose track of in subsequent reenactments. Something about stealing a rich neighbor’s cow, then charging him retail for the steaks.

“Honest, well,” his father said. “Look what happened to poor Shurik.”

“Oh?” Vladimir withdrew a long fish bone embedded between two molars. He remembered Uncle Shurik coarsely reprimanding Vladimir as a child for using the informal address (
ty
as opposed to
vy
) when chatting up Shurik’s fat Odessa wife. “What’s new with Shurik?”

“I don’t know the particulars, and I don’t want to know, personally, but they had a search warrant for his offices and everything.” His father shuddered visibly, then put his hands together as
a calming measure. He poured himself a mug of vodka and took a swig. “They say Shurik specialized in pyramid schemes. Know what those are, Volodya?”

Vladimir shook his head.

“Sometimes it shocks me how little you know about anything. Pyramid schemes, also known as Ponzi schemes, after one Carlo Ponzi. In the 1920s, this guy Ponzi, a little immigrant from Parma, comes to this fat land of ours with some bright ideas. He sets up a little investment club, takes money from greedy idiots, promises them impossibly huge returns, pays them off for a while by stealing from the next round of idiots, and then he screws everybody. Can you imagine it?”

Actually, Vladimir could. A pyramid scheme! Something for nothing. It sounded like a neat idea. How exciting to think his relatives were so gainfully employed. Perhaps they knew Mr. Melashvili and his seafaring Georgians.

“Shurik’s going to get some good lawyers, I’m certain. Real American lawyers. But your mother is afraid that some of his files will lead to me, which is really science fiction when you think about it. As it stands, it would take some extraordinary sleuth work and a raft of self-incriminating patients to drag me into jail.” His father laughed then coughed fiercely to expel a small bone that had strayed too far into his throat.

Vladimir pretended to busy himself with his flounder. His father had never talked with such candor about his dealings, although nothing was ever hidden from Vladimir. Especially since Mother had always gloated about how she, with only the abysmal education of a Soviet kindergarten teacher, had risen to such corporate prominence legally, while poor, stupid Father had to spend his days defrauding America’s paradoxical health care system.

“But as for you, son, my advice is: you do what
you
want to do. That’s my final pronouncement. Look at me. I never cared about
medicine, about saving or prolonging the lives of my patients, not that I’m such a bad person. I care about other things: fishing, gardening, the opera. The only medical fascination I ever had was on those freight trains with the women. Then your grandmother said to me: become a doctor, you’re smart, you’ll do well. Well, it certainly turned out to be a lucrative profession in America, the way we practice it here, anyway.” He swung his arm around to indicate he meant Fortress Girshkin with the little doctor’s shingle blowing in the breeze underneath a fake antique lamp.

Vladimir’s father finished off his mug and reached for a vodka refill. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Please do what
you
want to do with your life. What do you want to do, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” Vladimir said. “Maybe I want to teach.” Teach? Where the hell did that come from?

“Teaching, now that’s a strange kind of profession,” said his father. “There are some very unexceptional people out there teaching. And what if they send you to teach those kids in Harlem? Or the Bronx? Or Brooklyn? Or Queens? They’d tear you apart, those little animals. I was thinking, are you good with computers at all? Oh, but listen to me. Now I’m telling you what you should do. No, let’s drink to your happy but impractical pedagogic dreams.”

“And to Grandmother’s health,” Vladimir said.

“Yes, to that crazy old woman.” Dr. Girshkin finished the contents of his mug, then squeezed his mustache for stray drops of the familiar liquid. He sighed, breathing out the firewater. “You know, Vladimir, you and your grandmother are really all I have to live for in the world, well, as far as any man has to live for other people—what is it they say?—no man is an island. Your mother,
nu,
I picture she’ll be here with me till the end. We are like one of those many unfortunate corporate mergers they’ve had in the past decade; we are like Yugoslavia. But if I had to answer the question, who would I die for, if there was, say, a plane hijacking and the hijackers said
that one of us had to be killed, well, I’d die for you or Grandmother without thinking twice.”

Vladimir wiggled his toes in the tight childhood slippers (made of a resilient moleskin that lent itself to a frisky, animal foot odor) that his parents had saved and forced him to wear during visits. “Why would you die for Grandmother?” he asked. “She’s older.”

“It’s a good question,” said Vladimir’s father and concentrated on it for a spell while chewing on the flabby underhang of his thumb. It was clear to Vladimir that his father had thought out this hijacking scenario many times. “I would say conclusively that I do not have all that much to live for in my life. I don’t mean to sound especially sad but I’m sure many men my age would come to that conclusion. I think the only reason that I would not give up my life in exchange for Grandma’s is to be a father to you, but it seems to me that you really haven’t needed me as a father for some time now. You have a life that’s so far removed from this house, which we worked so hard, your mother and I, to put together, that sometimes . . . well, I wonder what the point was.”

Vladimir considered his new life with the Ruoccos. How far he had come. Yes. What
was
the point of all that hard work? “Well, I hope we never all get hijacked,” he said, moving aside his plate with the fragmented fish skeleton and wiping his dry brow with a napkin.

“I hope so too,” Vladimir’s father said, although his son remained unconvinced. If not in his professional or family life, then at least by dying at the hands of those reprehensible hijackers with the handlebar mustaches, Dr. Girshkin would be meted out a slice of dignity for all the world to see.

“So remember what we talked about today,” said his father. “The most important thing: you do what
you
want to do. And also, don’t get married unless you are ready to lose your happy youth. These are the two lessons we’ve learned today.”

Vladimir’s father got up, balancing himself against the plastic lawn table. He shook his bad leg (it had fallen asleep during dinner), then looked back to make sure Grandmother was all right as she wheeled herself about the Girshkin gardens. Having satisfied himself of his mother’s well-being, Dr. Girshkin limped back into the kitchen to fetch tea and cake, leaving Vladimir to hope that his father had said everything he wanted to say to him.

But he hadn’t.

AN HOUR LATER
,
his cheeks burning from his father’s kisses, Vladimir was conveyed from village to city by the 8:12
P
.
M
. Metro-North local train. If his peripheral vision was correct, he could have sworn he saw the flash of Mother’s amber brooch, a cheap Baltic treasure, in a train carriage headed in the opposite direction. Soon she would be back in the house, half-asleep on the couch, quietly enumerating for her husband the ignominies suffered during her fourteen-hour work day, the whisperings of American underlings behind her back, the mysterious cabals in the men’s room that were surely the signs of a native rebellion, a corporate coup d’etat. They always wanted more, the native-born. More money. Better health coverage. Endless two-week vacations. This is what happened when parents didn’t set limits for their children, when one was born into a boundless world.

“Please, porcupine, your troglodyte workers are scared to death of you,” the doctor would reassure his wife, as he brought her little dishes of eggplant caviar and whitefish salad, a cup of herbal tea to soothe her nerves. He would prop a pillow under her feet and tune the television to the show they both loved—the one where felonious movie stars were exposed for who they really were.

MEANWHILE
,
IN HER
upstairs bedroom, Grandmother would be dreaming of a lone oak tree hulking over a garden of milkweed and evening primrose, and in the shade of the oak tree that bow-legged
goy
from the village regiment, a shiny red star on his army cap, would look up from his kasha bowl and smile his abundant country smile for her. Suddenly, they would be dancing a mazurka in some big-city palace of culture, and he would press her against his chest and kiss her lips, first chastely then not . . . Because here in the hermitage of Grandmother’s dreams, among the wispy force fields of desire and history floating over the American suburbs, the kindly Sergeant Yasha finally loved her and there was enough happiness for all.

Downstairs, Dr. Girshkin was still awake. He examined his wife fast asleep on the couch, considered the difficulty of transporting her up to her bedroom, and, shaking his head in regret, retired to his basement abode.

In the basement, surrounded by plaster dust and loose electrical wires, the doctor had tried to recreate for himself the rickety village
izba
where he had spent his childhood: coarse off-white panels lining the walls were supposed to bring to mind the Russian birch; a set of unfinished wooden chairs gathered around a three-legged kitchen table bespoke an admirable poverty. On this table, there was some Pushkin, a little Lermontov, and, for some reason, a wayward copy of the
New England Medical Journal,
which the doctor quickly shunted under his bed. The great warm stove, the centerpiece of his youth, was missing from the ensemble, but what could one do?

The doctor turned on a fan, undressed, ate a conveniently placed piece of cheese, and put himself to bed. I will dream of the well-being of my son, he said to himself. But, alas, the dream would not come. There was something holding him back, an ugly impression from the little dinner party he had had with Vladimir. What
was it? He had spoken of the great themes—the futility of love, the ephemeral nature of youth. But he had babbled on about nothing, really! All that verbosity, Russian melancholy, and nostalgia were for naught. As always, he had missed the point. He should have said . . . Let’s see. Well, to start, he should have told Vladimir that he was tired. Just in those words: “Vladimir, I am tired.” Yes that’s what he should have said. Dr. Girshkin yawned as if to emphasize his tiredness.

And why am I tired, Vladimir? Well, if you must ask, I will answer. I am tired because emigrating to this country, leaving one’s hut, one’s yurt, one’s Soviet-era high-rise requires an ambition, a madness, a stubbornness, a stamina that I have never had.

Ach. Dr. Girshkin rearranged his moist sheets and propped his pillow this way and that. No, that sounded too pathetic, too defeatist. Instead, he should have been more theoretical about the whole matter. “You see, Volodya,” he should have said, “the Old World is populated by two breeds of peasants, the alpha peasant and the beta peasant. Now the alpha peasant, she feels the dry soil crack beneath her feet and quickly packs her family’s bags for the New World, while the beta peasant, poor fellow with his weak, sentimental heart, stays put and tills the desperate land. Your mother? Well, as you might have guessed, she’s the alpha peasant of our family, a force unswerving, impenetrable, inexorable. Do you follow me, Volodya?