Russian Debutante's Handbook (43 page)

“You know, my girl is actually very curious about my Russian friends,” Vladimir said.

“So then we’re agreed!” The Groundhog happily slapped his shoulder. “We will toast her American beauty together!” He turned
to the French doors leading to the kitchen and moved them apart with his feet, both shod in forest-green Godzilla slippers. “Have you met my Lena yet?” he asked, as more of his friend’s back became visible. “Would you like her to make you some porridge?”

BACK IN HIS
Panelak
flat, Vladimir paced his living room in a kind of angry stupor. Globalisms? Americanisms? What the hell was he talking about? Did he actually think he was going to introduce Gusev to the finer points of business-to-business marketing and public relations? What insanity!

The way things stood, only one man in Prava could help him. František. The happy apparatchik Vladimir had found during the Night of Men.

“Allo,” František picked up. “Vladimir? I was just about to ring you. Listen, I need to unload three hundred Perry Ellis windbreakers. Black-and-orange trim. Practically new. My cousin Stanka made some sort of an idiotic deal with a Turk . . . Any ideas?”

“Er, no,” Vladimir said. “Actually, I have a bit of a problem here myself.” He explained the nature of his predicament in a loud, frightened voice.

“I see,” František said. “Let me impart some advice. And remember, I’ve dealt with Moscow all of my adult life, so I know Gusev and his friends pretty well.”

“Tell me,” “Vladimir said.

“The Russians of this caliber, they only understand one thing: cruelty. Kindness is seen as a weakness; kindness is to be punished. Do you understand? You’re not dealing with Petersburg academicians here or enlightened members of the fourth estate. These are the people that brought half this continent to her knees at one point. These are murderers and thieves. Now tell me, how cruel can you be?”

“I have a lot of anger in store,” Vladimir confessed, “but I’m not very good at expressing it. Today, however, I lashed out at the Groundhog, my boss—”

“Good, that’s a good start,” František said. “Ah, Vladimir, we are not so different, you and I. We are both men of taste in a tasteless world. Do you know how many compromises I have made in my life? Do you know the things I have done . . .”

“Yes, I know,” Vladimir told the apparatchik. “I do not judge you.”

“Likewise,” František said. “Now, remember: cruelty, anger, vindictiveness, humiliation. These are the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Master them and you will do well. Tell these people how much you despise them and they will build you statues and mausoleums.”

“Thank you,” Vladimir said. “Thank you for the instruction. I will lash out at the Russians with my last strength, František.”

“My pleasure. Now, Vladimir . . . Please tell me . . . What the hell am I supposed to do with these goddamn windbreakers?”

THE AMERICAN LESSONS
began the next day. The Kasino was set up school auditorium–style, with rows upon rows of plastic folding chairs. When the seats were filled, Vladimir did a double take: the Groundhog’s people numbered as many as parliamentarians of a sizable republic.

Half of them Vladimir had never met. In addition to the core groups of soldiers and crooks, there were the drivers of the BMW armada; the strippers who supplied labor to the town’s more elicit clubs; the prostitutes who worked the Kasino and, in lean times, covered the nightly beat on Stanislaus Square; the cooks for the common mess-hall who ran an international caviar-contraband operation on the side; the young men who sold enormous fur hats
with the insignia of the Soviet Navy to Cold War aficionados on the Emanuel Bridge; the petty thieves who preyed upon older Germans straying from their tour groups—and that was only the personnel Vladimir could identify by their distinguishing combination of age, gender, demeanor, and gait. The majority of the congregants remained to him just so many other units of Eastern European refuse in their cheaply cut suits, their nylon parkas, their rooster haircuts, and teeth blackened by filterless Spartas, three packs per diem as life prescribed.

Forget Gusev. Forget the Groundhog. From now on they would all belong to Vladimir.

Vladimir took them by surprise. He ran out from the wings and kicked the oakwood lectern that had been stolen from the Sheraton and still bore its illustrious seal. “Devil confound it!” he shouted in Russian. “Look at you!”

The general incredulity and merriment that had pervaded the gathering stopped right there. No more giggling, no more loud slurping of the imaginary last drop out of an empty Coke can. Even old Marusya woke up from her opium nap. Gusev, seated alone in the last row, was glowering at Vladimir and fingering his holster. His troops, however, had been moved up front with the Groundhog.
Yes,
thought Vladimir, smiling at Gusev imperiously.
Now we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya . . .

“We’ve really done it, beloved countrymen,” Vladimir shouted, his whole body shaking from the adrenaline building up ever since the first ray of sun snuck in through the blinds and woke him, irrevocably, at 7:30 in the morning. “We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of all of Europe, we have truly shown our simple nature . . . For seventy years, we have been diligently licking clean an asshole, and it turns out to have been the wrong one!” Silence except for a spurt of laughter on one side, but one quickly nipped in the bud by surrounding colleagues. “What can account for such
a gaffe, I ask you? We gave the world Pushkin and Lermontov, Tchaikovsky and Chekhov. We’ve embarked thousands of gawky Western youths on the Stanislavsky Method, and if truth be told, even that damned Moscow Circus is not half bad . . . So how do we now find ourselves in this situation? Dressed so ludicrously, a provincial from Nebraska would have cause to laugh, spending all our money on elegant cars just so we can butcher their insides with our bad taste, our women dressed in raccoon furs strolling Stanislaus Square giving all that young girls can give—their very girlhood—to the same Germans at whose hands our fathers and grandfathers perished in defense of the Motherland . . .”

At this mention there was predictable patriotic fervor among the ranks: bearlike rumbles of discontent, spittle hurtling to the concrete floor, and, here and there, mutterings of “disgrace.”

Vladimir picked up on this. “Disgrace!” he shouted. His mind was still ringing with František’s lecture on the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Cruelty. Anger. Vindictiveness. Humiliation. He took out a pocket pack of Kleenex, the only item in his vest pocket, and threw it on the floor for effect. He spat on it, too, then kicked it clear across the stage. “Disgrace! What are we doing, friends? While the Stolovans, the very same Stolovans who we ran over in ’69, are out there building townhouse condominiums and modern factories that work, we’re snipping Bulgarian balls like radishes! [laughter] And what did the Bulgarians ever do to deserve this, may I ask? They’re Slavs like us . . .”

(
Slavs Like Us: The Vladimir Girshkin Story.
Thankfully the crowd was too agitated to make light of Vladimir’s lack of Slavonity.)

“Well, you’re going to learn and you’re going to learn the hard way what it means to be a Westerner. Remember Peter the Great shaving Eastern beards and disgracing the Boyars?” Here he looked, just a glance, at Gusev and his closest men, who barely had the time
to react. “Yes, I suggest you review your history texts, for that is exactly how it will be done.
Those who are not with us are against us!
And now, my poor, simple friends, here’s what you’re going to do first . . .”

And he told them.

IT WAS A
day commemorating the transition from November to December, with the local trees hanging on to the last of yellow, the leaden sky cut with lines of ethereal blue where the whipping winds had cleared a swath through the pollution. The Russians, dressed in the black-and-orange Perry Ellis windbreakers that Vladimir now required of all employees, were sitting around the clearing (the same clearing where Vladimir and Kostya staged their athletic drills) like a ring of dark butterflies. In the background, an armada of twenty BMWs and a dozen jeeps were being cannibalized by a team of German mechanics in smocks.

Out came the zebra-striped seats, the woolly cup holders, the shocking Electric Plum ground effects—all tossed water-brigade–style past a line of bobbing blond heads and into the circle of the clearing. There, the personal offerings to the God of Kitsch were already assembled: the nylon tracksuits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog’s vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War–losers—all would be kindling for the flames.

As those lowest on the totem pole splashed gasoline across this burial ground of rosy-cheeked nesting dolls and giant lacquered soup ladles, some of the older women—Marusya, the opium lady, and her clique, in particular—began to whimper and make soft clicking sounds of regret. They wiped their eyes and adjusted each other’s head scarves, often collapsing into mournful embraces.

In a matter of seconds, the fire began its crackling susurrations.
Then something unstable (perhaps it was the giant can of brilliantine with which Gusev’s men slicked back their thinning hair) exploded with a trace of orange into the darkening sky, and the crowd gaped at the pyrotechnics, the more adventurous young men bringing their hands forward for warmth.

The Groundhog, sighing with the entirety of his soft chest, took an impressive swig out of his vodka flask, then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out the two fuzzy dice that had previously bounced one against the other from the rearview mirror of his BMW, like two puppies with just each other for amusement. He rubbed them together as if to create another fire, then sunk his nose inside one of them. After a few minutes of this melancholia, the Hog leaned back, smiled, closed his eyes, and cast both dice into the flames.

THROUGHOUT THE PROCEEDINGS
in the auditorium and in the woods, those of an inquiring nature could turn around to see an attractive middle-aged gentleman with a PravaInvest visitor’s tag sitting apart from the herd and doodling in his little memo pad. In a white shirt and corduroy vest, with a gentle, bemused expression on his face, he appeared rather harmless. And yet despite the organization’s closely followed axiom that harmless people should always be sent to the hospital, no one dared approach this strange professorial man who chewed on his pen and smiled for no reason. He was more than harmless. He was František.

And he was impressed. “Brilliant!” he said to Vladimir, leading him away from the clearing and toward a wrecked suburban highway where Jan and the car were waiting. “You really are Postmodern Man, my friend. The bonfire and the self-denunciation contest . . . I must say, you are clown and ringmaster all at once! And thank you for helping me get rid of those infernal windbreakers.”

“Ah,” Vladimir said, clasping his hands to his bosom. “You don’t know how happy you’re making me, František. I can’t tell you how incomplete I was without you. I’ve been working on this stupid pyramid scheme for four months, and all I could get was a paltry quarter million out of some daft Canadian.”

Jan opened the car door and the two slipped onto the warm back seat. “Well, that will soon change, young man,” František said. “I have only one curious problem . . .”

“You have a problem?”

“Yes, my problem is that I am a sufferer of visions.”

“You suffer from visions,” Vladimir repeated. “I can recommend a doctor in the States . . .”

“No, no, no,” František laughed. “I am a sufferer of good visions! For instance, last night I had this dream . . . I saw a local congress hall being rented out for a caviar brunch . . . I saw a promotional film about PravaInvest broadcast on a screen of enormous proportions . . . By morning, I dreamed of twenty such brunches at five hundred persons per brunch. Ten thousand English-speakers, roughly one-third of the present expatriate population. All the children of mamas and papas from happier lands. All potential investors.”

“Aha,” Vladimir said. “I see such wonders as well, but I don’t quite understand how this film will be financed.”

“Now, it is fortunate for you,” said František, “that I have friends in this nation’s vast and underemployed film industry. Furthermore, my chum Jitomir manages a gargantuan conference center in the Goragrad district. As for the caviar, well, I’m afraid you’re on your own regarding the caviar.”

“No problems there!” Vladimir said and he acquainted František with the international caviar-contraband venture the Groundhog’s men had put together. As he divulged the dark and grainy details, the weather outside the car turned fickle, playing first with a palette of loose baby-pink clouds, then clearing the
canvas to sear the approaching Golden City with brilliant sunshine. Each brightening and darkening made Vladimir all the more excited, for it confirmed that change was on the way. “Dear God!” he cried. “I believe we are ready to proceed!”

“No, wait,” František said. “That was hardly the sum of my visions,” he said. “I see more. I see us buying an industrial plant. A failed one, of course.”

“There’s one I’ve seen on the outskirts of town,” Vladimir said. “The Future Tek 2000. That one looked like it failed a century ago.”

“Yes, yes. My cousin Stanka bought a piece of the Future Tek. It’s a chemical plant that not only failed a century ago but actually exploded last year. Perfect. I must have supper with Stanka. But I see still more. I see that night club we talked about . . .”

“I see that, too,” Vladimir said. “We’ll call it the Metamorphosis Lounge in deference to Kafka and his mighty grip on the expatriate imagination. ‘Lounge’ is also a popular word these days.”

“I hear Drum N’ Bass music. I see a soft, fuzzy, highbrow kind of prostitution. I feel something up my nose. Cocaine?”

“Better still,” Vladimir said, “I have learned of a revolutionary new narcotic, a horse tranquilizer, which we can get in bulk by way of a French veterinarian.”

“Vladimir!”