Russian Debutante's Handbook (44 page)

“What? The horse tranquilizer is too outré?”

“No, no . . .” František’s eyes were still closed; the veins on his forehead were bulging with high concepts. “I see us listed on the Frankfurt Stock exchange!”

“Bozhe moi!”

“I see NASDAQ.”

“God help us.”

“Vladimir, we must act soon. No, forget soon. Today. Right now. This is a magical moment for those of us lucky enough to be in this part of the world, but it is no more than a moment. In three
years Prava will be history. The expat crowds will be gone, the Stolovan nation will become a Germany in miniature. Now is the time to be alive, my young friend!”

“Hey, where are you taking me?” Vladimir asked, suddenly aware that they had crossed the New Town and were going to some mysterious burned-out district beyond.

“We’re going to make a movie!” František cried.

VLADIMIR
’
S FAVORITE
Cold War coincidence? The uncanny similarities between the Soviet architectural style of the eighties and the cardboard sets of
Star Trek,
the grand American kitsch program of the sixties. Take, for instance, the 1987-built Gorograd District Palace of Trade and Culture which František had procured for his weekly caviar brunches and for screenings of
PravaInvest: The Movie.
Captain Kirk himself would have felt at home in this giant approximation of a twenty-fifth-century radiator. He would have plopped himself down on one of the orange plastic space chairs, which filled the auditorium’s starry interior, then looked on in exaggerated horror as the enormous viewing screen crackled to life, the voice of a fearsome enemy space creature announcing the following:

“In its six years of existence, PravaInvest, s.r.o., has become, by far, the leading corporate entity to arise from the rubble of the former Soviet Bloc. How did we do it? Good question.”

So now the truth would be revealed!

“
Talent.
We’ve united seasoned professionals from
industrialized Western nations with bright and eager young specialists from Eastern Europe.”

There they were: Vladimir and an African actor in a golf cart, swinging by an enormous white wall on which the words
FutureTek 2000
were printed in futuristic corporate script. The wall ended and the golf cart pulled into a grassy field where happy workers of many ethnicities and sexual orientations cavorted beneath an ever-rising inflatable phoenix, PravaInvest’s rather shameless corporate symbol.

“
Diversity of interests:
From modernizing film studios in Uzbekistan to our brand-new high-technology industrial park and convention centre—the Future Tek 2000—coming soon to the Stolovan capital, PravaInvest has left no market uncornered.”

How about those Uzbek film studios! And the scale model of the tree-lined FutureTek campus, that postindustrial Taj Mahal!

“
A Forward-Looking Mentality.
Have we mentioned the Future Tek 2000? Of course! The vanguard of technology
is the only place to be
whether you’re running a modern high-rise hotel in the Albanian capital of Tirana, a vocational school for the Yupik Eskimo in Siberia, or a small but consequential literary magazine in Prava. And PravaInvest’s ideals are as solid as our reputation for prudent investment. We’re committed to building lasting peace in the Balkans, cleaning up the Danube,
and
issuing the most exceptional dividends to our investors. We have our cake and eat it too,
every single day.
”

Before a Bosnian was shown eating his torte, and after the Yupik Eskimo waved to the camera with their T-squares and protractors, Cohen and Alexandra were caught leaning over
Cagliostro
proofs engaged in heated (and, thankfully, silent) discussion. The camera made Cohen seem fat and thirtyish, while Alexandra, with her round face and dark curving lashes, looked positively Persian. A great cheer greeted the literary pair, a cheer that extended way beyond the Crowd (gorging itself on caviar in the first row) to all the youthful precincts in the auditorium. Even Morgan—her relationship with Vladimir still choppy and unsettled—looking tonight like a bored young embassy wife stuck in some Kinshasa or Phnom Penh, had to pick up her hands and clap at the image of her dear friend Alexandra. Yes,
Cagliostro
had been a stroke of genius, a marketing tool to be studied at Wharton. Too bad the damn thing still didn’t exist.

“So what are you waiting for? Shares of PravaInvest stock have been circulating on the Tanzanian stock exchange at approximately U.S. $920 per share. We are now pleased to offer them for nearly half the price in an effort to ‘give something back’ to those who have enabled our meteoric rise: the residents of the former Warsaw Pact. For information on our current schedule of dividends please call Vladimir Girshkin, Executive Vice President, at our Prava headquarters: tel. (0789) 02 36 21 59 / fax 02 36 21 60. Or call his associate František Kral at (0789) 02 33 65 12. Both are fluent in English and more than happy to assist you.

“Now it’s your turn to GIVE SOMETHING BACK!
PravaInvest, s.r.o.”

MEANWHILE
,
courtesy of the poet Fish, a package arrived from Lyon containing twenty vials of liquid horse tranquilizer, cooking instructions for transformation of said into snorting powder, and the most God-awful poetry to appear in an Alaskan literary journal. Vladimir took this loot to Marusya and explained the situation to her. She shook her balding head as if to say,
“Nu,
what’s in it for me?” Vladimir knew it wasn’t a matter of her antidrug principles. She tended to the opium garden with loving grace and surely skimmed off the top both in the garden and at her little concession stand. Hell, by nine in the morning when Vladimir went off for his jog with Kostya (Vladimir looking as cheerless as a conscript in a labor brigade), old Marusya was already tweaked enough to fumble on the obligatory
dobry den’.

So a hard-currency compromise was reached, and Marusya, limping ahead like a blighted hobbit, took him down to the main building’s basement where several gas-fired stoves were lined in a row awaiting some devious purpose. They didn’t have to wait long. Inside their cracked ceramic interiors, the liquid horse tranquilizer was cooked at a tremendous temperature in an assortment of pots and pans. Once cooked, Marusya would flip the resulting wafer as gingerly as if it were a blin and set it to cool on a metal tray. Afterward, she’d go at it with a mallet until the wafer was reduced to a small mountain of snortable powder, which she would wrap into a little cellophane log and set out for Vladimir’s inspection. This she did while beaming with the pride of workmanship, her mouthful of gold teeth gleaming in the basement’s dusty air.

Vladimir assembled a nice stack of the little tranquilizer logs, although for the time being he didn’t know where to push them, what the right segue would be for offering up the fifteen-minute lobotomies to the Crowd and beyond. For that he would need his club, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

MC PAAVO ARRIVED
a few days hence on a little turbo-prop bearing the Finnish cross on its tail. He couldn’t shut up even before he got off the plane. They heard his deep voice knocking about in the cabin while they waited on the tarmac: “MC Paavo in de haus! In de pan-European ’hood! Got de Helsinki beat, y’all can’t fuck wif!”

He was no older than František, only he hadn’t kept well at all: wrinkles carved deep to the order of the San Andreas Fault, a hairline in recession and not in the graceful arc of male-pattern baldness, but instead a jagged line, like soldiers beating a piecemeal retreat from the front. To maintain his youth he jabbered like a fifteen-year-old on crack, and sniffed at his armpits as if a great youthful elixir flowed from each. The Finn, only marginally tall, hugged František, ruffled his hair, and called him “My boy-ee,” while the former socialist globetrotter, unfamiliar with hip-hop expressions but never one to be left out, responded with “My girl,” and here the hilarity crested for a bit.

They took Paavo to the Kasino, where he dropped to his knees and crawled about a bit, citing amps and wattage and other technical specifications lost on our Soviet-bloc friends. “Great,” he said. “Knock out the two floors above and we ready to start pumpin.’ ”

This request actually gave Gusev’s men something constructive to do: They went after the glue-and-cardboard floors with electric staple-guns and machetes, with axes and grenade launchers, with protective goggles and a Russian’s unshakable hope that from destruction the Lord will create anew. By the time they were finished, not only the two floors above the Kasino were removed, but a skylight was knocked through the sixth floor as well. Vladimir, a resident of the Kasino building, found himself temporarily homeless, forced either to squat in Morgan’s pad or take a room at the Intercontinental. Despite his problems with Morgan, he resigned himself to the former.

The Russians’ hopes of providence, however, were not entirely unfounded. The Lord didn’t provide, but Harold Green did. The Canadian’s funds paid for a gorgeous, loopy discorama flanked by enough theme lounges to keep the saddest drunk happy. It was christened, as we already know, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

A NIGHT TO
remember at the Metamorphosis Lounge? Good luck. You’ll need three omniscient narrators to cobble together half a narrative. But, what the hell, let’s try to maintain some dignity and recall what happened on night X, hour Y, in the main room, the Kafka Insecuritorium.

On that particular night the dance floor is hogged by the new
arriviste
crowd, Prava’s temporary “it” thing by dint of their impressive numbers and some sort of media-publishing party connection they share in New York–Los Angeles, with a stopover in London–Berlin. There they are: white people in chamois lounge suits and bug-eyed sunglasses, falling apart on the dance floor to the thumpa-thumpa of MC Paavo and the whirl of his techno fog. One gets up, another falls down. One takes off his shirt to reveal himself flabby and old, just as his girlfriend, sweaty and young, is waking up and putting on her bra: a miscommunication. Now they’re crying and hugging. Soon enough they’re waving to the captain’s table, shouting, “Vladimir! Alexandra!”

At the captain’s table the wave is returned. “Sure, I wouldn’t want to risk sending any of our men to Sarajevo right now,” Harold Green is shouting to Vladimir over MC Paavo’s twenty beats per second. Harry’s webbed face is further creased with concern as he is likely thinking about PravaInvest’s “bright and eager young specialists” dodging enemy fire behind the rump of a U.N. armored personnel carrier.

“Have another drink, Harold. We’ll talk Bosnia tomorrow.”

Speaking of Bosnia, there’s Nadija. She’s from Mostar or thereabouts, her face as chiseled as a constructivist bust of Tito, her body as long and purposeful as that of a socialist-worker heroine, the mother of a nation. There she goes, leading by the chin a small, bearded liberal-arts specimen with an eager hamster expression, a pouf of red hair, and a tragic limp. She’s not taking him to the Ministry of Love, though. Its twenty bunkbeds, truncheons, and prized Israeli water cannon are for a different, later part of the night. No, first, the pale gentleman must do away with modern malaise: It’s time for a visit to Grandmother Marusya’s Infirmary, where there’s borscht for colds, opium for headaches, and horse tranquilizer for overactive imaginations.

BACK AT THE
insecuritorium . . . At the Captain’s Table, is that . . . Could it be? Alexandra and Cohen necking? Yes! Marcus the rugby runt, Alexandra’s ex-boyfriend, is gone—Daddy stopped wiring him funds, so it’s “back to naffing England for me, mate.” A closer look reveals Alexandra looking great tonight, formal in a spaghetti-strap dress and with her hair up. But the pouches under her eyes have the texture of leather, and then there’s the red swelling around her nostrils, a swelling from which sprout dark little hairs as thick and straight as dry grass. Someone’s been grazing at the horse stables one time too many.

But just look at her new beau. Cohen’s taken a beautiful old Armani sports jacket and roughed it up so that it is no longer a tool of oppression. He’s trimmed his beard and hair so that he looks five years older, with a doctoral thesis in the hopper. And now he’s wrapped his big arms around Alexandra and is telling her to calm down, that it’s all right, that she can drop her nightly dosage in the toilet, they’ll go to Crete next week to dance among
the sheep, to drink mineral water and talk about themselves until it all makes sense. It’s hard to hear him above the bird squawks and jackhammer noises slipping off of MC Paavo’s turntable, but one can be sure that Cohen’s telling her that he loves her and he always has.

AND WHAT ABOUT
Vladimir? At the other end of the Captain’s Table, there he is, watching Cohen neck with Alexandra, as Harold Green begins his latest series of mind-bending lectures on his Soros Foundation in the sky. Vladimir takes a long look around the Metamorphosis, this terra incognito that he and František and MC Paavo have wrought in the biblical span of forty days. It’s a late hour, much too late for a Monday—and it’s usually around this time that Vladimir starts to ask himself the questions that cannot be answered with a healthy application of horse tranquilizer or a sip of one of the U.S.$5.50 Belgian lagers that have made the Metamorphosis so hip and solvent.

For instance: What would Mother think of his clever new venture? Would she be proud? Would she consider his little pyramid scheme a cheap alternative to an MBA? Has he inadvertently created something that will please her? Come to think of it, is there really any difference between Mother’s corporate colossus and his scrappy PravaInvest? And was it true what they said, that childhood was destiny? That there was no escape?

Finally, the one question Vladimir Girshkin has been trying to avoid all night by waxing nostalgic about Mother and fate and greed and his own strange, inglorious path from victim to victimizer: