Russian Debutante's Handbook (31 page)

“Ca—what?” Cohen said.

“The magazine,” Larry Litvak said with a roll of the eyes. When not stoned out of his gourd he apparently found ignorance quite shocking.

“We’re calling it
what
?” Cohen said, turning on Vladimir.

“Remember you were reading that obscure Milanese metahistorical journal about that Sicilian charlatan and alchemist, Cagliostro, and you said, ‘Hey, aren’t we all just a little like him, staking out our claim in this postsocialist wilderness?’ Remember?”

“Cag-li-ostro!” Alexandra said with flair. “Oh, I like that.”

There were murmurs of approbation.

“Right,” Cohen said. “Actually I was thinking of a couple of names, like maybe
Beef Stew,
but . . . You’re right. Whatever. Let’s just run with my first thought.”

“So this is not going to be a mainstream journal,” Morgan said. She looked very sober there, with her hands in her lap, her eyes open wide, her well-plucked eyebrows raised as she tried to put in her two cents among the loud and fractious Crowd. It was bewildering for Vladimir to see a beautiful person who didn’t make herself the center of attention in one way or another (Alexandra always pulled it off so well!), and he didn’t make things any easier by saying: “Main
stream?
We’re not even treading the same brook as the others.”

But before she could be embarrassed, the conversation instantly shifted toward the topic of the lead piece, and L. Litvak brazenly put forth his Yuri Gagarin space odyssey, when Cohen turned to
him and said, “But how can we even consider passing up Vladimir’s poem for the top spot?”

Everyone hushed. Vladimir searched Cohen’s face for sarcasm, but it looked tempered, not so much resigned as perspicacious, understanding. With the empty beer bottles in front of him and a smudge of hummus in the fluff of his pseudobeard, Vladimir took a mental snapshot of Cohen as he had pretended to have taken a picture of Mother in the nonexistent Chinese restaurant. Friend Cohen getting wisdom, catching on.

“Yes, of course, Vladimir’s poem,” said the awakened Plank.

“Of course,” Maxine said. “It’s the most redeeming piece I’ve heard since I’ve come here.”

“By all means, Vladimir’s poem!” shouted Alexandra. “And Marcus can decorate it. You can draw something, honey.”

“Then you can put my story right after it,” Larry said. “It’ll act as counterbalance.”

Vladimir picked up a glass of absinthe. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “I would like to take the credit for this work myself, but, sadly, I can’t. Without Perry’s mentorship, I could have never cut to the heart of the matter. I’d still be writing the adolescent crap, the shaggy-dog poems. So, please, a toast!”

“To me!” Cohen smiled his “Sunrise, Sunset” elderly papa smile. He reached over to pat Vladimir’s head.

“You know . . .” Morgan was saying after the ripples of the toast had subsided and no one had anything else to say. “You people. This reading. This is all so new to me. Where I come from . . . Nobody . . . This is sort of how I pictured Prava. This is kind of why I came here.”

Vladimir’s jaw dropped at the sound of this unsolicited honesty. What the hell was she doing? You don’t just admit these things, no matter how true they are. Did Young Beauty (with the
long brown hair) need an introductory course in poseurdom? Self-invention 101?

But the Crowd soaked it right in, punching each other’s shoulders in jest. Yes, they sort of kind of knew what she was talking about, this sweet, dazzling newcomer in their midst.

They took Morgan with them after they left the Joy. Later, when Alexandra got the chance to be alone and personal with her in a decaying Lesser Quarter ladies’ room, she found out that Morgan had found Vladimir’s poetry “brilliant” and Vladimir himself “exotic.” So maybe there was hope for her, after all.

BUT VLADIMIR PUT
her out of his mind. There was serious work to do. Phase Two had gone off without a hitch; bad poetry had carried the day; the checkbooks were out and ready. He looked to Harold Green, generously making his way past the supplicants at the Carrot Bar, each begging for one of the Joy’s hefty artist-in-residence grants. By the looks of him, Harold was on the most important mission of his life. Destination: Girshkin.

No doubt about it, Phase Three’s time had come.

The suckling phase.

WAKE UP
,
SHOWER
,
and get to church. Vladimir did as his pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience told him. He swallowed vitamins and drank glasses of water. His new alarm clock was still howling. He put on his one and only suit bought on a whim from the new German department store for tens of thousands of crowns and realized that it was meant for a person twice his size. “
Dobry
fucking
den’,
” he said to himself in the mirror.

In the side lot by the opium garden, his car was idling along with Jan. The sky was a desolate bleached-out blue with patches of russet clouds as thick as bark on which, it seemed, advertisements could be placed and sailed above the city. Kostya was doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps; the gardening lessons imparted by Vladimir’s father had long lost their relevance.

“Good morning, Tsarevitch Vladimir,” Kostya said upon seeing him. He looked more dignified than ever today—no nylon, just khakis, brogues, and white cotton shirt.

“Tsarevitch?” Vladimir said.

Kostya ambled over and snapped the shearlike things at Vladimir, missing him by centimeters. He seemed all too happy at the prospect of a Russian Orthodox Sunday. “The check cleared
from the Canadian!” he shouted. “What’s his name? Harold Green. The club owner.”

“The full quarter million? You mean . . . Heavenly God . . . Are you saying that . . . ?” Was he saying that U.S.$250,000.00, the equivalent of fifty years of wages for the average Stolovan, had gushed into the Groundhog’s kitty like the Neva River melting in the spring? And all through Vladimir’s free-market treachery? No, it could not be. The world rested on sounder poles: north and south; the Dow Jones and the Nikkei; the wages of sin and the minimum wage. But to sell two hundred and sixty shares of PravaInvest at U.S.$960.00 a pop . . . That was out there in Loop-de-Loop Land where Jim Jones, Timothy Leary, and Friedrich Engels rode their unicorns up and away into the pink-purple sky.

True, Vladimir did recall Harry drunk and delusional at the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, his head in his hands, his pate, bald and moist, gleaming like the martini decanters arrayed above the bar. Slobbering, weeping: “I have no talent, my young Russian friend. Only off-shore accounts.”

“Get out of here!” Vladimir barked without warning, surprising even himself. This was the tone of Mother addressing one of her native-born underlings, some poor accountant with a state school education. Was Vladimir drunk? Or was he more sober than ever? It felt like a little bit of both.

“What?” Harry said.

“Get out of this country! Nobody wants you here.”

Harry pressed his drink to his chest and shook his head without comprehending.

“Look at you,” Vladimir continued bellowing. “You’re a little white boy in a big white man’s body. Your father and his capitalist cronies destroyed my nation. Yes, they fucked the peace-loving Soviet people right and proper.”

“But, Vladimir!” Harry cried. “What are you saying? What nation? It was the Soviets who invaded the Stolovan Republic in 1969—”

“Don’t start with your cozy little facts.
We do not bow to your facts.
” Vladimir suspended his diatribe for a minute and took a deep breath.
We do not bow to facts?
Hadn’t he seen that slogan once, in his youth, on a communist propaganda poster in Leningrad? Just what the hell was he becoming? Vladimir the Heartless Apparatchik?

“But you’re wealthy yourself,” Harry protested through his tears. “You have a chauffeur, a BMW, that nice felt hat.”

“But that is my right!” Vladimir bellowed, ignoring the kindly impulses his better organ—his heart—was pumping through the left ventricle along with the liters of frothy type-O blood. There would be time to indulge Mr. Heart later . . . This was war! “Have you not heard of identity politics?” Vladimir shouted. “Are you daft, man? To be rich in my own milieu, to partake in the economic rebirth of my own part of the world, why, if that’s not part of my narrative, what the hell is?” At this point, Vladimir himself almost became misty-eyed as he pictured Francesca, the woman at whose feet he had learned the ways of the world, walking in through the gilded doors of the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, smiling wanly as Vladimir beheaded this sorry creature in the same way she used to castrate the politically challenged masses in New York. Oh, Frannie. This is for you, honey! Let greatness and beauty prevail over baldness and nullity . . .

“My narrative!” Vladimir resumed screaming. “It’s about me, not about you, you imperialist American swine.”

“I’m Canadian,” Harry whispered.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Vladimir shouted, grabbing him by the folds of his oversized rugby sweater. “Don’t even go there, pal.”

AND LATER
,
IN
the rank Nouveau bathroom, where the piss of the English-speaking world mingled on the chipped marble, Vladimir personally applied minoxidil around the Arctic outposts of Harry’s remaining hair, while a lone, smashed New Zealand tourist looked on, one hand poised to reach for the door in case things went too far.

By this point, Vladimir was rocked from side to side by waves of pity. Oh, that poor Harry Green! Oh, why was embezzlement so cruel? Why couldn’t rich people just spontaneously give money away like that nice Soros fellow? Vladimir even leaned over to kiss Harry’s wet brow like a concerned parent. “There, there,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?” Harry said, wiping his scarlet eyes, blowing his tiny twisted nose, trying to regain the quiet dignity that, before this wretched evening, had been his signature. “Even if I do grow back my hair, that’s only half the battle. I’ll still be old. I’ll still be a . . . What did you call me?”

“An interloper.”

“Oh, God.”

“Harry, my sweet man,” Vladimir said, recapping the minoxidil bottle, his portable fountain of youth. “What am I going to do with you, huh?”

“What? What?” Vladimir looked at Harry’s reflection in the mirror. Those huge red eyes, the freckled chin, the receding gums. It was almost too much. “What are you going to do with me, Vladimir?”

AND TWENTY MINUTES
later, winding through the darkened streets around the walls of the castle, the parapets coming in
and out of the corners of vision, Beethoven’s Seventh blaring off the CD player, Vladimir held the checkbook steady on the crying Canadian’s lap. To be honest, Vladimir was shaking a little, too. It was hard to come to terms with what he had done. But this wasn’t really
the worst
kind of crime, now was it? They were going to print a literary journal! A journal with Harry’s name prominently displayed. It was all part of the familiar cultural Ponzi scheme practiced the world over—from third-rate dance collectives to those idiotic creative-writing programs. The participants put in their time and money, dutifully attended each other’s kazoo recitals and poetry readings, and by the end of the day the only ingredient missing from their enterprise was the actual talent (much as a regular Ponzi scheme lacks the actual cash). Still, was it so terribly wrong to give people a little hope . . . ?

“PravaInvest will do for you what cultural relativism did for me,” Vladimir said, patting the soft head resting warmly on his shoulder. “Now, two hundred sixty shares is not a lot. I’ve got a couple of Swiss going in for three thousand. But it’s an introduction to the global continuum. It’s a start.”

“Ooh, if only my father knew where his lousy money was going!” Harry laughed. “I can’t wait to fax him that
Cagliostro
journal. And pictures of that hospital in Sarajevo! And the Reiki clinic, too!”

“Now, now,” Vladimir said, as the car’s headlights illuminated an archway carved into a castle wall, beyond which the Lower City was repositioning itself so that its spires would lie directly at Vladimir’s feet. “Let’s not be spiteful, Harry.” And he gave his new investor a pleasant squeeze, then ordered Jan to set a course for Harry’s villa, where his gurgling friend, reeking of minoxidil and self-love, could be deposited for the night.

And that was that. The cash register opened, the digits turned, the sun rose once again over Prava.

“
YES
,
THE FULL
quarter-million,” Kostya said, confirming yesterday’s wondrous news, as he fell on his knees before the young tsar and kissed his hand with his dry, chapped lips.

“And ten percent of it is mine,” Vladimir said. He had not intended to say it out loud, but to stifle a sentiment like that was not possible.

“The Groundhog said he will give you twenty percent as an incentive,” Kostya said. “Can you lunch with him after church?”

“Of course!” Vladimir said. “Let’s hurry then! Jan, start the car!”

“No expensive car, please,” Kostya said.

“Pardon?”

“We show our piety on the way to church by taking public transportation like the rest of the congregants.”

“Oh my God! Are you serious?” This was a little much. “Couldn’t we just take a Fiat or something?”

Jan smiled and twirled the car keys around his meaty forefinger. “I’ll drive you gentlemen as far as the metro station,” he said. “Now be good Christians and kindly open your own doors.”

THE METRO WAS
designed in the Lenin’s Starship motif: the walls chrome-plated in futuristic shades of that socialist-friendly color, ecru; the cameras at the edge of the platform recording the reactionary tendencies of the passengers; the Soviet-built trains that inspired many an Ode to Moving Metal from besotted Slavs around the bloc; the recorded voice of some sturdy, no-nonsense Heroine of Socialist Labor over the public address system: “Desist in entering and exiting! The doors are about to close.”

And close they did, as fast as lightning cranked out of some totalitarian power-station out in the woods. Look! Everywhere
Vladimir turned—Stolovans, Stolovans, Stolovans! Stolovans in Prava, of all places!
Dobry den’,
Milan! Howdy do, Teresa? Did you get a haircut, Bouhumil? Panko, stop climbing on the seats!