Russian Debutante's Handbook (32 page)

The wagonful of these “Stolovans on the Move” rumbled toward the Tavlata. At the Castle station they picked up some British grade-schoolers in uniform who swiftly moved to one corner and behaved themselves like good little gentlemen. They were disgorged at the Old Town station, the last outpost of Tourist Prava, and were replaced by teenage locals with out-of-control acne, polyester leisure suits, and high-tops.

On and on they went. The distances between the stations got progressively longer. The bored teenage boys were now making slurping sounds to one of their girlfriends, a tall pimpled beauty in a Lycra skirt who took out a book and busied herself flipping through the pages, while a
babushka
waved a fist the size of a beefsteak tomato at the boys and shouted something about their “unsocialist upbringing.”

“Hooligans!” Kostya said. “And on a Sunday, too.” Vladimir nodded and pretended to doze off. At his present rate of ascension he could foresee a time when it would be possible to tell Kostya the Angel to bugger off, and to let his debauchery and projected lechery assume the sum total of his waking hours. But he had to have a friend in the Russian circuit, a shield from Gusev and the merry men with the Kalashnikovs out in the lobby. Everyone held Kostya in high regard, this Vladimir knew. When Kostya went to church, it was as if he went to church for all of them. Plus he knew something about computers—you could never underestimate that.

And then, while Vladimir never enjoyed the huffing and puffing sessions beneath the sun, and the craziness with the ten-pound dumbbells, he was aware of a new physical vitality that went along nicely with his new big-man-on-campus image. For instance, he was straighter, and, as a consequence, taller. His breasts, the objects
of Gusev’s merriment, which had at one point reached such a state of disrepair that even Vladimir himself had started to find them mildly arousing, were slowly being shaped into two hard little mounds suitable for flexing. His lungs were in better order, too—he didn’t leave a trail of mucus behind after each lap; when smoking hashish he could keep the smoke in longer and let it percolate among the nooks and crannies of his asthma-scarred villus.

But still he wanted freedom from the Lord’s man in Prava, or at least a lighter schedule. More time to splash water on his face and get his bearings in the morning.

BY THE TIME
they disembarked they were the only ones left on the train. At ground level the main smokestack of a factory rose dramatically above them like a NASA rocket with a serious fire in the capsule. In one direction a distant huddle of
panelak
s shimmered in the translucent chemical haze. In another direction there appeared to be a vast stretch of nothing. Kostya looked toward the nothing, using his hand as a visor against the late morning sun. Vladimir looked to the cherub and smiled, trying to appear both enthusiastic and confused. He made a few epic sweeps of the hand as if to indicate that the “nothing” was not a good thing and the powder towers and jazz clubs of the Golden City were really more his cup of grog.

Kostya remained unmoved. He found a bus schedule tacked on to an enormous electrified fence that enclosed the factory. “There,” he said. “There should be one now.”

And by the dictate of God, Kostya’s coconspirator, an entirely empty double-jointed bus, its two tremendous halves bound together by a thick oval of rubber, rounded the corner, raising dust in its wake. The bus stopped, let out a long sigh as if overcome by its loneliness for passengers, and opened its many doors.

THEY RUMBLED THROUGH
the fields of emptiness, the giant factory growing distant in the dirty rectangle of the back window. The empty fields looked to Vladimir as if they had been tortured by Romania’s dreaded Securitate, the soil randomly upturned and heaped into mounds or depleted into mini-canyons.

Kostya sat pensively, his hands cupped together as if he was praying already, which might have been the case. “You know, my mother’s very sick,” he said without the customary preamble.

“How terrible,” Vladimir quickly replied.

“Yes. I don’t know how it will turn out. I’m going to pray for her.”

“Of course.” Vladimir fidgeted quietly. “I’ll pray for her too.”

Kostya gave his thanks and turned to the window and the empty view. “If you want,” Vladimir said, “I can give you the money to fly her to Austria for better medical treatment. That is, if you need the money.”

“I thought about that. Of doing it with my own money. But I want her in Russia in case she . . . I want her to be surrounded by her own people.” Vladimir nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment, but somehow the phrase “her own people” reminded him of the fact that these concerned and helpful (and mythical) Russians of the medical profession were a far cry from
his
own people, whom Kostya’s mother would probably not appreciate milling about her deathbed with their legendary big noses and dirty hands. But then again, that was just an assumption. There were some Russians who weren’t like that. Kostya, for one, knew of Vladimir’s missing foreskin and never said anything derogatory. On the other hand, he was taking him to church.

Amid the empty fields they came across “The International Technological Joint Venture—FutureTek 2000,” announced by a freshly painted billboard on the side of the road. It resembled
something of a Victorian-era factory mated to a grain silo, really just a collection of thick, rusted pipes and bulbous metal containers joined together at odd angles. To think that somewhere within this pastiche of industrial decay a new fax modem was waiting to be born was to invest too much hope in the resilience of the human spirit.

Now, thought Vladimir, you take some white plaster walls, throw them up around the factory, perforate a mock-tinted window along one of the sides, stick a couple of recycling bins out front, and presto! Why sell worthless shares to Stolovans at ten crowns a pop, when you can unload them to Americans at ten
dollars?
He made a note.

THE CHURCH WAS
hiding behind the factory, with a small field of failing carrots separating the two. It looked rather Appalachian, the church did—a little corrugated tin shack with a metal Orthodox cross that gleamed amid the empty surroundings like a television antenna bringing news of civilization beyond. “Please,” said Kostya and opened the door for him.

You couldn’t mistake the parishioners for anything but Russians. Tired, stern faces that even in the meditative act of prayer looked ready to kick some ass for their fair share of beets, sugar, and a parking space for the beat-up Lada microsedan. Broad, heavy bodies bursting with thick veins and copious sweat, looking as if they had been somehow blown out of proportion by a diet of meat and butter—par for the course in a world where one had to appear as formidable as a tank to start the wheels of distribution turning.

Kostya bowed to a few of them and pointed at Vladimir, eliciting several difficult smiles and the tiniest of whispers. Vladimir hoped he looked more like Jesus than Trotsky to them, but an icon above the altar showed the prototype of the one whose second
coming was awaited—a very gentile Christ indeed, with light brown hair verging on dirty blond, the traditional soft-focus physiognomy, and, of course, a look of supreme transcendence that Vladimir didn’t even want to begin to fathom. Yup, he was in church.

But it wasn’t too shabby, the service. There was a certain uncertainty to the message, the way the priest, as bearded and robed and wizened as could be (you knew you were getting your piety’s worth with this guy), would belt out, singsong-like: “Je-sus has risen!” and the crowd would reply in unison, “Verily, He has risen.” Nice the way this central fact had to be constantly affirmed. But
of course,
He has risen. What would it all mean if He hadn’t risen, eh, Vanya?

And crossing yourself was great too, kneeling and crossing endlessly. It felt good—swift and powerful. The
goys
were good with the swift-and-powerful shtick. Columbus and his wooden armada sweeping into the New World on an Atlantic breeze and a prayer; the medieval English galloping through hot, dusty Palestine bedecked in a ton of steel. Crossing, always crossing themselves. Before the Hebrew God you could only bow repeatedly and feel sorry about your place beneath Him, but with Christ there it was, with your hand—up, then down, then right, then left. Christ has risen? Why, yes, verily.

Vladimir must have crossed himself impressively because several of the
babushkas,
their blue eyes glowing within their shawls, were clearly taking note of his vigorous motions and loud proclamations. Kostya gave him a smile so wide it could have been redeemed for a place in Heaven. This went on for a while, the tiny room suffused with the brightness of candles and a pair of oversized, out-of-place halogen torchieres like the floor samples Vladimir had seen at the German department store. The smell of sweat and the incense swung about by the priest was getting a bit heady and just as Vladimir was making sure the back door was still
present and accessible, Christ was resurrected one last time and it was all over.

They lined up before the priest who kissed them in turn and said something brief to each congregant. Waiting on line, Kostya introduced Vladimir to a couple of nice old ladies whose doubts about “the dark one” had dissipated over the course of the services like the whoosh of stale air released over the empty horizon upon the opening of the front door. The priest kissed Vladimir on the left cheek and the right, his breath smelling surprisingly of dill pickles, and said, “Welcome, my dear young one. Christ has risen.”

“Yes, um,” said Vladimir, although there was, of course, a better way of saying it; they had, in fact, just said it three hundred times. But His Holiness, broad-shouldered and erect despite his considerable age, with his booming voice and pungent kisses, would make even the most godless members of the Spartacist League quiver in their ankle-high Doc Martens. “You must be Greek,” the priest said.

“Half-Greek, half-Russian,” Vladimir said. It just came out that way.

“Delightful. Will you join us for a little meal now?”

“Sadly, I can’t. I’m expected with my family in Thessalonica. I was just off to the airport. But next week, definitely.”

“Delightful,” the priest said again, and then he had his turn with Kostya, who whispered something into his ear which made the priest laugh uproariously, his beard, as grand and white as his person, taking on a hairy life of its own. It was a mirth Vladimir could not understand, since God’s business was, by all means, a serious one, especially when one of your flock proved to be a Jew in Greek’s clothing.

He bowed his way past the congregants and out the door, where a steady autumn rain was gathering force and the sky appeared a tablecloth of unrelenting gray.

WELL
,
THAT WAS
all over with, thank God, and off he was in his marvel of Bavarian tinkering, speeding away on the Tavlata’s eastern embankment, thinking Faster! Faster, Jan! for the Groundhog and the most expensive restaurant in Prava awaited. Oh, he had been duplicitous with the Angel, as always, getting off at a suburban metro station to “briefly visit an American friend, a pious man of Serbian lineage . . .” And there, by prior arrangement, Jan and the unholy Beamer awaited their master. Taking the metro to lunch—a little too déclassé for an upscale
gonif
like Vladimir.

The restaurant was situated opposite the castle, with full view of the river growing full under the autumn rain, tourists galloping across the Emanuel Bridge, their umbrellas torn apart by a wind strong enough to have breathed life into a hundred Golems. It was a restaurant popular with rich Germans and American mommies and daddies visiting their drifting progeny, and, yes, a certain Russian “entrepreneur.”

The Groundhog kissed Vladimir on both cheeks and then presented his own pock-marked ones. Vladimir closed his eyes and uttered a ridiculous “Mwa!” with each kiss.

With the male Eastern European love overture complete, Vladimir was allowed to take his seat; across the table, the Groundhog squirmed like a happy little papoose in its swaddling clothes, only he was a large, corpulent mafioso in an unflatteringly tight brown suit. “Look,” he said, “your appetizer’s already here!”

True enough, there was a circle of fatty rings of squid lying atop, of all things, butternut squash, with some sort of powder dusted in the middle that smelled vaguely of parmesan and garlic. At twenty dollars a plate, the restaurant promised to serve no carp, its wine list was purged of the sickly-sweet Moravian vintages that
made Prava’s head spin, and the proprietors had airlifted an actual old guy from Paris to tickle their Steinway’s ivories beneath a huge Art Nouveau spread of frolicking nymphs.
Bon appétit!

The Groundhog munched, both cheeks bulging. “Beautiful job with that Canadian donkey,” he said once his squid was finally dispatched. “That’s right, why not start out big? Why not a quarter million?”

“This money is good,” Vladimir said. “The world owes us for the last seventy years. This money is very good.”

They drank bottles of Chardonnay, beaming at each other in the unspoken argot of success. By the fourth bottle, and with the braised hare in pimiento reduction well on his way, the Groundhog got sappy. “You’re the best,” he said. “I don’t care who you are, what tribe you came from. You’re just the greatest.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s true,” the Groundhog said, working fast on the complimentary bread and horseradish paste. “You’re the only one I don’t have to worry about. You’re an adult, a businessman. Do you know what trouble I have with Gusev’s men?” He flipped the Russian bird—the thumb stuck between the index and middle fingers—to a table by the kitchen where members of his bouffant-haired, pinstriped security team were slumped over their empty Jim Beam bottles.

“Oy, tell me,” Vladimir said, shaking his head.

“I’ll tell you,” the Groundhog said. “You know I got problems with the Bulgarians, right? With the whole stripping and prostitution racket on Stanislaus Square? So these men of Gusev’s, these fucking cretins, they go to the Bulgarians’ bar and the usual nonsense starts about the girlfriends, the questions of who fucked who first, and who sucked who where. And when it’s all over they got this one guy, Vladik the Dumpling, that’s the Bulgarians’ number two, actually . . . They got him strung up by his feet over the
bar, and they cut off his dick and his balls, and they bleed him to death! That’s fucking Gusev’s men for you! No brains, no skills, nothing. They cut off a man’s dick and his balls. I said to them, ‘Where do you idiots think you are—Moscow?’ This is Prava, the waiting room to the West, and they’re going around cutting—”