Russian Debutante's Handbook (47 page)

“I see,” Vladimir said. “And by blowing up the Foot, you’re . . . taking care of that . . . Ah, that pesky history!”

“You don’t know how their families have suffered!” Morgan suddenly said. She was staring at Vladimir with those dead gray eyes, her political eyes, or perhaps the eyes of some greater unhappiness.

“Oh, yes,” Vladimir said. “How right you are, Morgan. What do I know? You see, I was actually brought up by Rob and Wanda Henckel of San Diego, California. Yes, a healthy childhood spent watching the Pacific surf crash at my big suntanned feet, a four-year stint at UCSD, and now here I am, Bobby Henckel, senior brand manager of Flo-Ease Laxatives for the Eastern region . . . That’s right, Morgan, please do tell me more about what it’s like to be from this part of the world. It all sounds so damn exotic and, jeez, kinda sad, too . . . Stalinism, you say? Repression, eh? Show trials, huh? Wowsers.”

“It’s different for you,” Morgan muttered, glancing at Tomaš for support. “You’re from the Soviet Union. Your people invaded this country in 1969.”

“It’s different for me,”
Vladimir repeated. “
My people.
Is that what you’ve been telling her, Tom? Is this the world according to Alpha? Ah, my dear stupid fellows . . . Do you know how similar we are, the three of us? Why, we’re the same proto-Soviet model. We’re like human Ladas or Trabants. We’re ruined, folks. You can blow up all the Feet in the world, you can rant and rave through the Old Town Square, you can emigrate to sunny Brisbane or Chicago’s Gold Coast, but if you grew up under that system, that precious gray planet of our fathers and forefathers, you’re marked for life.
There’s no way out, Tommy. Go ahead, make all the money you want, hatch those American babies, but thirty years later you’ll still look back at your youth and wonder: What happened? How could people have lived like that? How could they have taken advantage of the weakest among them? How could they have spoken to each other with such viciousness and spite, much as I’m speaking to you right now? And what’s that strange coal-like crust on my skin that clogs the shower drain every morning? Was I part of an experiment? Do I have a Soviet turbine instead of a heart? And why do my parents still quake every time they approach passport control? And who the hell are these children of mine in those Walt Disney World parkas running around making noise like there’s nothing to stop them?”

He got up and walked over to Morgan, who shifted her gaze away from him. “And you,” he said, recovering some of the anger he had lost during his speech to the Warsaw Pact duo. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your battle, Morgan. You have no enemies here, not even me. That pretty Cleveland suburb, that’s for you, honey. This is
our
land. We can’t help you here. Not any of us.”

He finished his drink, felt the surge of its lemony warmth, and, quite unsure of what he was doing, walked out of the apartment.

WIRY GUSTS OF
wind were prodding frozen Vladimir forward, jabbing at his back with sharp-nailed fingers. He was wearing nothing more than a sweater, a woolen pair of winter janitor pants, and some long underwear. And yet the deadly circumstances of being caught coatless on an icy January night did not bother Vladimir. A steamy river of alcohol ran through him.

He tumbled ahead.

Morgan’s building was an isolated structure, but further in the distance, beyond a ravine that concealed an old tire factory, there
decamped a regiment of condemned
panelak
s, which, with their rows of broken windows, looked like short, toothless soldiers guarding some long-sacked fortress. Now, there was a sight! The five-story concrete tombstones, perched on a little hill, were slouching toward the ravine, one building having shed its facade entirely so that the tiny rectangles of its rooms were exposed to the elements like a giant rat maze. Chemical flames emanating from the tire factory in the gorge below lit up the building’s ghostly recesses, reminding Vladimir of grinning holiday jack-o’-lanterns.

And once again, the undeniable feeling that he was home, that these ingredients—
panelak,
tire factory, the corrupted flames of industry—were, for Vladimir, primordial, essential, revelatory. The truth was that he would have ended up here anyway, whether or not Jordi had taken out his member in that Floridian hotel room; the truth was that for the last twenty years, from Soviet kindergarten to the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, all the signs had been pointing to this ravine, these
panelaks,
this sinking green moon.

He heard his name being called. Behind him, a small creature was steadily advancing, bearing in its arms what seemed to be another creature, which on closer inspection proved to be only a dead coat.

Morgan. She was wearing her ugly peacoat. He heard the crunch-crunch of her footsteps in the snow and saw clouds of her breath puffing skyward at regular intervals like the effusions of an industrious locomotive. Other than her footfalls there was complete silence, the winter silence of a forgotten Eastern European suburb. They stood facing each other. She handed him the coat and a pair of her fluffy purple earmuffs. He figured it must have been the brutal cold that was filling her eyes with steady tears, because when she spoke it was in her usual collected manner. “You should
come back to the house,” she said. “Tomaš and Alpha are getting a taxi. We’ll be alone. We can talk.”

“It’s nice here,” Vladimir said, slipping on the earmuffs, gesturing at the ruined buildings and smoky ravine behind him. “I’m glad I took a walk . . . I feel much better.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but already his voice was lacking in malice. It was hard to think of a reason to hate her. She had lied to him, yes. She had not trusted him the way lovers sometimes trust one another. And so?

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Morgan said. “I talked with Tomaš.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vladimir said.

“Still, I’d like to apologize . . .”

Vladimir suddenly reached out and rubbed his hands on her cold cheeks. It was the first contact they had had in hours. He smiled and heard his lips crack. The situation was clear: They were two astronauts on a cold planet. He was, for his part, a gentle dissembler, a dodgy investment guru with his hands in many pockets. She was a terrorist who drove tent stakes into the ground, who cradled mewing stray cats in her arms, not to mention the poor Tomaš. Vladimir was weighing his words to best describe this arrangement, but soon found himself speaking rather indiscriminately. “Hey, you know, I’m proud of you, Morgan,” he said. “This thing, this blowing up the Foot, I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I’m glad you’re not just another Alexandra editing some stupid lit mag with a funky Prava address. You’re like on a . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of Peace Corps mission . . . Except with Semtex.”

“C4,” Morgan corrected him. “And nobody’s going to get hurt, you know. The Foot’s going to—”

“I know, implode. I’m just a little worried about you. I mean, what if they catch you? Can you imagine yourself in a Stolovan jail? You’ve heard the
babushka
s’ war cry. They’ll send you to the gulag.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes in thought. She rubbed her mittens together. “But I’m an American,” she said. She opened her mouth again, but there was nothing more to say on the subject.

Vladimir absorbed her arrogance and even laughed a little. She was an American. It was her birthright to do as she pleased. “Besides,” Morgan said, “
everybody
hates the Foot. The only reason it didn’t get knocked down is because of official corruption. We’re just doing what everyone wants. That’s all.”

Yes, blowing up the Foot was actually
democratic.
A manifestation of the people’s will. She really was an emissary from that great proud land of cotton gins and habeas corpus. He remembered their first date all those months ago, the eroticism of her snug bathrobe and easygoing ways; once again, he wanted to kiss her mouth, lick the brilliant white pillars of her teeth. “But what if you
do
get caught?” Vladimir said.

“I’m not the one that’s gonna blow it up,” Morgan said, wiping her teary eyes. “All I’m doing is storing the C4, because my apartment is the last place anyone would look.” She reached over and fixed his earmuffs so that they corresponded directly with his ears. “And what if
you
get caught?” she said.

“What do you mean?” Vladimir asked. Him? Caught? “You’re talking about this PravaInvest shit?” he said. “It’s nothing. We’re just ripping off a few rich people.”

“It’s one thing to steal from that spoiled Harry Green,” Morgan said, “but getting Alexandra and Cohen hooked on some awful horse drug . . . that’s fucked up.”

“It’s really that addictive, huh?” Vladimir said. He was heartened by the fact that she was assigning relative values to his misdeeds—drug dealing, bad; investor fraud, less bad. “Well, maybe I should phase that stuff out,” he said. He looked to the overcast skies pondering his horse tranquilizer’s vast profit margins, substituting horse powder for stars.

“And that Groundhog,” Morgan said. “I can’t believe you would want to work for someone like that. There’s, like, nothing redeeming about him.”

“They’re my people,” Vladimir explained to her, holding his hands up to demonstrate the messianic concept of
my people.
“You have to understand their plight, Morgan. The Groundhog and Lena and the rest of them—it’s as if history’s totally outflanked them. Everything they grew up with is gone. So what are their options now? They can either shoot their way through the gray economy or make twenty dollars a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk.”

“But don’t you find it dangerous to be around maniacs like that?” Morgan asked.

“I suppose,” Vladimir said, enjoying the furrowed look of concern on her face. “I mean there’s this one guy, Gusev, who keeps trying to kill me, but I think I’ve nailed him pretty good for now . . . You see, I usually whip the Groundhog in the bathhouse with birch twigs . . . It’s like this ceremonial thing that I do . . . And Gusev used to . . . Well, for one thing, Gusev is this murderous anti-Semite—”

He stopped. For a few frozen moments the burden and the limitations of Vladimir’s life seemed to float along on his breath like cartoon captions. By then, they had been standing on the extraterrestrial surface of Planet Stolovaya for over ten minutes with only their earmuffs and mittens providing life support. The wintry landscape and the natural loneliness it engendered was taking its toll; at once, without prompting, Vladimir and Morgan embraced, her ugly peacoat against his fake-fur–collared overcoat, earmuff to earmuff. “Oh, Vladimir,” Morgan said. “What are we going to do?”

A gust of tire-factory smoke disgorged itself from the ravine and took on the shape of a magical jinni just released from his glassy prison. Vladimir pondered her reasonable question, but came up with one of his own. “Tell me,” he said, “why did you like Tomaš?”

She touched his cheek with her arctic nose; he noticed that her proboscis always seemed a bit more globular and full-bodied at night, perhaps the work of shadows and his failing eyesight. “Oh, where do I start?” she said. “For one thing, he taught me everything I know about
not
being American. We were penpals in college, and I remember he’d send me these letters, these endless letters I could never completely understand, about subjects I knew nothing about. He wrote me poems with titles like ‘On the Defacement of the Soviet Rail Workers’ Mural at the Brezhnevska Metro Station.’ I guess I took Stolovan and history classes just to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And then I landed in Prava and he met me at the airport. I can still remember that day. He looked absolutely hopeless with that sad face of his. Hopeless and darling and also like he desperately needed me to touch him and to be close with a woman . . . You know, sometimes that’s a good thing, Vladimir, to be with a person like that.”

“Hmm . . .” Vladimir decided that he had heard just about enough on the subject of Tomaš. “And what about me—” he started to say.

“I liked that poem you read at the Joy,” Morgan said, kissing his neck with her glacial lips. “About your mother in Chinatown. You know what my favorite line was? ‘Simple pearls from her birthland . . . Around her tiny freckled neck.’ It was awesome. I can totally see your mother. She’s like this tired Russian woman and you love her even though you’re so different from her.”

“It was a stupid poem,” Vladimir said. “A throwaway poem. I have very complicated feelings for my mother. That poem was just bullshit. You have to be very careful, Morgan, not to fall in love with men who read you their poetry.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Morgan said. “It was nice. And you were right when you said that you and Tomaš and Alpha had a lot in common. Because you do.”

“I had meant that in an abstract sense,” Vladimir said, thinking of Tomaš’s psoriasis-scarred face.

“See, here’s the thing about you, Vladimir,” she said. “I like you because you’re nothing like my boyfriends back home and you’re nothing like Tomaš either . . . You’re worthwhile and interesting, but at the same time you’re . . . You’re partly an American, too. Yeah, that’s it! You’re needy in a kind of foreign way, but you’ve also got these . . . American qualities. So we have all these overlaps. You can’t imagine some of the problems I had with Tomaš . . . He was just . . .”

Too much of a good thing,
Vladimir thought. Well then, here was the scorecard: Vladimir was fifty percent functional American, and fifty percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath. He was the best of both worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola, blue-light specials, and the prospect of a quick pee during commercial breaks.

“And we can go back to the States when all this is over,” Morgan said, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him back to her
panelak
with its promise of stale Hungarian salami and a glowing space heater. “We can go home!” she said.

Home! It was time to go home! She had selected her quasi-foreign mate of a line-up of wobbly candidates, and soon it would be time to head back to Shaker Heights. Plus, as an added bonus, she didn’t even have to declare him at customs; Citizen Vladimir had his own shiny blue passport embossed with a golden eagle. Yes, it was all coming together now.