Russian Debutante's Handbook (21 page)

“And I will walk through the streets of Prava, with my chest stuck out proudly . . .” He stuck out his chest. “I will walk as a big, beautiful American.”

Vladimir put his arm around Mr. Rybakov’s lumpy back and pressed the old sailor to him. His smell reminded him of his step-grandfather’s who died in America after a prolonged bout with cirrhosis of the liver, kidney stones, and, if one could trust Dr. Girshkin’s diagnosis, an imploded lung. There it was—the vodka breath; the musky aftershave; and that certain brisk industrial scent, which brought to Vladimir’s mind the image of machine oil sprinkled liberally across the gears of a rusted Soviet metal press, the kind at which Vladimir’s step-grandfather once pretended to toil. It pleased Vladimir that the Fan Man smelled the same. “And now, Comrade Rybakov,” he said, “or, as we say in this country, Mister Rybakov, you will permit me to buy you several drinks.”

“O-ho,” Rybakov said and squeezed Vladimir’s nose with his many-flavored fingers. “Well, let’s go find a bottle then!” They helped each other out into the oddly silent street where the afternoon sun bore down on the cast-iron facades and on a string of idled moving vans.

HIS LAST FEW
hours in Manhattan were spent in a cab with tinted windows; Roberta had been kind enough to advance him a thousand dollars from her considerable savings, and advised him to stay mobile and not to call anyone (especially “the woman”). As for Baobab, according to Roberta, he was holed up with relatives in Howard Beach, while his uncle Tommy tried to broker a cease-fire with Jordi.

Meanwhile, Vladimir spent two hundred dollars going around the limestone curve of the Flatiron building, down Fifth Avenue past the Ruoccos’ apartment house, then through the smaller Village tributaries that lead to the Sheridan Square subway station. It was from this station that Fran would daily disembark on her way back from Columbia, and Vladimir was entertaining the odd hope
of seeing her, just one more glimpse, for memory’s sake. He made fifty of these trips, all of them in vain. It was remarkable the cabby didn’t drive him straight to Bellevue.

Fifth Avenue, the first Friday of September, the heat and business of a late afternoon, the shish-kebab stands closing down for the day, women with suggestive crescents of calf departing work at furious clips, another grand evening in the making here in the documented epicenter of the precise navel of the universe, the first New York evening that would pass without Vladimir in attendance. Yes, good-bye to all that. Good-bye to Vladimir Girshkin’s America, its lofty landmarks and sour smells, good-bye to Mother and Doctor Girshkin and their tomato patch, to the several strange-duck friends that were cultivated, to the flimsy goods and meager services that gave sustenance, and, finally, to his last hope of conquering the New World, to Fran and the Ruocco Family, good-bye.

And good-bye to Grandma. To think of America, he had to start with her, the only one who had consistently tried to better his stay here, she who had chased him over the hills and dales of the Girshkins’ upstate
dacha
trying to force-feed him wedges of cantaloupe, deep bowls of farmer cheese . . . How simple life would be if it began and ended with food-for-love and an old woman’s sloppy kiss.

And what of Fran? On his final Village circuit he thought he saw her, a straw hat, a bag of peppers for the Ruoccos’ nightly feast, a leisurely wave to an acquaintance passing by. He was mistaken. It was not her. But while he was under false impressions, his instinct was to lunge out of the slow-moving cab, press his lips to one studded ear, and say . . . what? “Nearly raped by a drug lord. Marked for death. Gotta run.” Even in contemporary circumstances, where just about everything is possible, this was not possible. Or perhaps he could have said it in terms she would appreciate, the words of the doomed Swede boxer in the Hemingway story:

“Fran, I got in wrong.”

But after this nonencounter with Fran, he ordered the driver to the airport. There was nothing more to be done. America, it seemed, was not entirely defenseless against the likes of Vladimir Girshkin. There was a sorting mechanism at work by which the beta immigrant was discovered, branded by an invisible ß on his forehead, and eventually rounded up and put on the next plane back to some dank Amatevka. The events of the last few days were no mere coincidence, they were the natural culmination of Vladimir’s thirteen years as an unlikely Yankee Doodle, a sad mark on his Assimilation Facilitator’s record.

Well, fuck America; or, in poetic Russian parlance,
na khui, na khui.
He was almost glad that he didn’t see Fran, that the past, which only yesterday was the present, was over. He had failed once again, but this time he had come away all the wiser. The boundaries, the contours of victimization at the hands of Mother, Girlfriend, and this dough-bellied adopted land of his, were all too clear. He would never suffer like that again. In fact, he would never be an
immigrant
again, nevermore a man who couldn’t measure up to the natives. From this day forward, he was Vladimir the Expatriate, a title that signified luxury, choice, decadence, frou-frou colonialism. Or, rather, Vladimir the
Re
patriate, in this case signifying a homecoming, a foreknowledge, a making of amends with history. Either way . . .Back on that plane, Volodya! Back to the part of the world where the Girshkins were first called Girshkins!

HE DUG HIS
nails into his palms and watched tangible Manhattan become a cardboard skyline behind him. Soon enough he would remember precisely what he was leaving (everything; her) and have his little crying jag on the plane.

But a few hours later he would already be on the other side, the
low-rent side of the planet, recovering, reconnoitering, thinking of pyramid schemes and rich Americans scarfing down pork and cabbage beneath a topcoat of Mittel Europa mist . . .

Thinking of getting in good.

THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE
,
on the way from one jerry-built life to another, from the grim, disorganized airport in Leningrad with its faintly fecal odor and the toxic-sweet stench of Soviet detergent on the ground to the grim, organized one in New York where PanAm jumbo jets sat by departure gates like patient whales, Vladimir Girshkin had done the unthinkable and wept. It was the kind of outburst his father had prohibited at the conclusion of toilet training, on the grounds that there were few things left in the world that separated the sexes, but tears and sniffling certainly headlined the list. On that pug-nosed Aeroflot liner, trapped between rows of American tourists playing tea time with their hard-currency samovars and discovering the pleasant reductive logic of the Russian nesting doll, a livid Dr. Girshkin, surely comical-looking to the Westerners around him in his torn leather parka and ruined horn-rimmed glasses (both victims of last-minute violence at the hands of his wife), grabbed his son by the collar and ordered him to the lavatory to complete his whimpering.

As the older Vladimir now sat in a similar aluminum loo thousands of meters above Germany, his jeans around his ankles, his flowing nose in a towelette, his thoughts easily came around to his
earlier bout of transatlantic despair: the customs hall in Pulkovo Airport, Leningrad, the spring of 1980.

It was only on the night before the Girshkins’ departure that the strange truth had finally been revealed to Vladimir: The family would not be taking the train down to their hutlike
dacha
in Yalta as had been promised; instead, they were to fly to a secret place, its very name unmentionable. A secret place! An unmentionable name! A-a! Small Vladimir was soon hopping about the apartment, jumping from suitcase to suitcase, making a fort out of the closet using his heavy galoshes as battlements, nearly precipitating an asthma attack through his adolescent rampage. Mother restricted him to the living-room couch, which smelled of childhood sweat and served as his bed come ten o’clock, but Vladimir would not be so easily restrained. He grabbed Yuri the Giraffe, the stuffed war hero whose spotted chest was pinned down with Grandfather’s Great Patriotic War medals, and threw the rattling creature up against the ceiling until the perennially unhappy Georgians in the flat above began stomping for quiet. “Where are we going, Mama?” Vladimir shouted (back then she was still known to him informally as Mama). “I’ll find it on the map for you!”

And Mother, paranoid that her easily excitable son might spill their destination to the neighbors, only said, “Far.”

And Vladimir, jumping through the air, said, “Moscow?”

And Mother said, “Farther.”

And Vladimir, jumping still higher, said, “Tashkent?”

And she said, “Farther.”

And Vladimir, now reaching nearly the same height as his flying giraffe, said, “Siberia?” Because that’s as far as it got, and Mother said that no, it was even farther than that. Vladimir spread out his beloved maps and traced his finger farther than Siberia, but it wasn’t even the Soviet Union out there. It was something else. Another country! But
nobody
ever went to another country. And so
Vladimir spent the night running around the flat with volumes of the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
under his arm, screaming in alphabetical order, “Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bermuda . . .”

It was the next day at customs, however, that the Girshkins’ departure took a turn for the worse. The well-fed men of the Interior Ministry in their tight polyester uniforms, now completely without reason for concealing their hatred for the soon-to-be ex-Soviet family before them, obliterated their luggage, tearing apart the wide-collared Finnish shirts and the few passable business suits smuggled through the Baltics, clothes which Vladimir’s parents had hoped would last them through their first interviews in New York. This was done ostensibly to find any hidden gold or diamonds that exceeded the minuscule amount allowed to leave the country. As they tore through Mother’s address book, shredding anything with an American address, including her Newark cousin’s instructions on how to get to Macy’s, a particularly large gentleman, whom Vladimir would never forget as having had a mouth frighteningly empty of teeth (even the silver kind that were standard issue to middle-aged Warsaw Pact citizens) and a strong smell of sturgeon on his breath, said to her: “You’ll be back, Yid.”

The agent had proved to be rather prescient, for after the Soviet Union collapsed Mother did return on several occasions to buy up a few choice pieces of the former empire for her corporation, but at the time all that occurred to Vladimir was that Mother—the bulwark against the storm outside the window, the woman whose word was the law of the household, from whose hands could come either a mustard compress that would torture through the night or a glossy volume on the Battle of Stalingrad that would be moored by his bedside for a year—was a Yid. Granted he had been called a Yid before; in fact, he had been called that every time his health allowed him a foray into the gray world of Soviet education. Yet he
had always thought of himself as being the most thorough of Yids—small, stooped, sickly, and with a book regularly by his side. But how could anyone say that of Mother who not only read to Vladimir about the Battle of Stalingrad but looked ready to wage it all by herself.

And to Vladimir’s surprise, as the pages of her address book scattered about her and as the customs agents roared in appreciation of Comrade Sturgeon-Breath, Mother did nothing but twist the strings of her little leather purse around her whitened hand, while Dr. Girshkin, avoiding the frightened gaze of his son, made slight and ambiguous gestures toward the departure gate and their escape.

Then, before he knew it, they were buckled in, snow-covered, gas-streaked Russia rolling beneath the airplane’s wings, and only then did Vladimir allow himself the luxury, the necessity, of crying.

Now, thirteen years hence, with the jet headed in the opposite direction, Vladimir felt the intervening years effortlessly collapsing into a meaningless interlude. He was the same little Volodechka with the Yid last name, with the eyes puffed from crying and the nose wet from running. Only this time destiny wasn’t a Hebrew school carefully landscaped into a sylvan Scarsdale lot followed by a progressive Midwestern college. This time around, destiny was a gangster named after a fuzzy marmot.

And this time there would be no room for those silly mistakes—those slips of the amateur assimilationist—that had nearly cost him his life a week ago in a fading Floridian hotel room with that loose-fleshed naked old man; those brief bouts of idiocy and self-victimization that had put him on this Lufthansa flight fleeing New York and his imperious Francesca in disgrace. They belonged to an earlier Vladimir, a sweet and transparent one for whom the world had little use.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. Vladimir wiped his
face, stuffed his pockets full of emergency tissue, and headed out past the rows of grumbling retired Virginians on a group tour waiting for the facilities, some with their cameras slung around their necks as if in preparation for that wayward Kodak moment en route to the crapper. He resumed his seat next to the window. The plane was riding over a patched carpet of thin, feathery clouds, a sign, his father had taught him over one country breakfast at the
dacha,
of an impending change in weather.

VLADIMIR STOOD ON
the ramp breathing European air, his shirtsleeves rolled down against the autumn wind. The Virginians were gasping at the lack of modern connecting gates between the plane and the tired-looking green terminal, which Vladimir nostalgically pegged as late-socialist architecture, the kind built after local architects had long given up on constructivism and just said: “Hey, here’s some greenish glass and something not unlike cement. Let’s make a terminal.” Above the building, in large white letters:
PRAVA
,
REPUBLIKA STOLOVAYA
. Oddly enough, in Russian “Republika Stolovaya” meant “the Cafeteria Republic.” Vladimir smiled. He was a big fan of the meaty Slavic languages: Polish, Slovak, and now this.