Russian Debutante's Handbook (48 page)

But how could Vladimir abandon all that he had achieved? He was the King of Prava. He had his very own Ponzi scheme. He was avenging himself for his entire rotten childhood, swindling hundreds of people who most likely deserved his vengeance. He was going to make Mother proud. No, he wouldn’t go home!

“But I’m making money here,” Vladimir protested.

“It’s okay to make some money,” Morgan said. “We could
always use the money. But Tomaš and I are going to wrap it up with the Foot pretty soon. We’re thinking maybe April or so for the detonation. You know, I can’t wait for that damn thing to explode already.”

“Eh . . .” Vladimir paused. He was attempting, momentarily, to order and catalog her entire psychology. Let’s see. Blowing up the Foot was an act of aggression against the father, right? Therefore, Stalin’s Foot represented the authoritarian constraints of a Middle American family,
ja? A Day in the Life of Morgan Jenson,
that sort of thing. So her panic attacks were gone because, to quote her campus shrink, Morgan was
lashing out.
At the Foot. With Semtex. Or C4, rather.

“Morgan—” Vladimir started to say.

“Come on,” she said. “Walk faster. I’ll make us a bath. A nice warm bath.”

Vladimir dutifully increased his pace. He looked back once more at the condemned
panelak
s and at the blazing ravine, and noticed the quadruped figure of a stray dog pawing the edge of the precipice, trying to see if it could slip down to the warmth of the tire factory without losing its canine footing. “But Morgan!” Vladimir shouted, yanking her coat sleeve, suddenly worried about the most elemental thing of all.

She turned around and presented him with the Face of the Tent, the halo of sympathy he had found in her eyes after he had climbed on top of her. Oh, she knew what he wanted, this shivering homeless Russian man in a pair of purple earmuffs from Kmart-Prava. She grabbed his hands and pressed it to her heart buried deep beneath her peacoat. “Yes, yes,” she said, hopping on one foot to keep warm. “Of course, I love you. Please just don’t worry about that.”

HE LEARNED NOT
to worry about it. He put his arms around her. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. She must have done likewise.

Their devotion to their strange projects was inspiring. They were as busy as New York office workers and Vladimir, for his part, just as productive. By the end of the year the PravaInvest juggernaut had rumbled across the expatriate landscape to collect over five million U.S. dollars through sales of its uncommon stock, its brisk business in veterinarian supplies, and the quick turnover at the Metamorphosis Lounge. The FutureTek 2000 even presented the public with a shiny plastic box labeled “fax modem.”

The dedicated staff was mobilized. Kostya took the financial reigns, František ran the burgeoning agit-prop machine, Marusya performed daily miracles out in the opium fields, Paavo dropped “phat” beats with distinction, and Cohen even managed to turn out a spiffy little literary journal.

Yes, a lot had happened to Cohen since the misadventure with Gusev and the skinheads, his much-trumpeted liaison with Alexandra being but one long ostrich feather in his mighty rabbit-fur cap. Recently, for example, Vladimir’s friend had delved into
Cagliostro
in a way that, clearly, he had never delved into anything
before. Each week he managed to spend at least fifty hours at the computer, surprising himself with what his single-mindedness and organizational skills could accomplish even when creativity failed. Cohen was even planning to use his night of Gusevian woe as a starting point for a long essay on the failings of Europe and, unavoidably, his father.

Satisfied of his subordinates’ entrepreneurial zeal, Vladimir allowed himself a month in the West with Morgan. The first week of March found them in Madrid running from club to club with a group of friendly Madrileños who chased after the night’s pleasure with the zest of Americans dashing after Pamplona bulls. Weeks two and three were spent in Paris, particularly at a mellow Marais
boîte
where some kind of fusion jazz was served up with a course of cheeses, and much champagne was consumed. By the fourth week Vladimir woke up at London’s Savoy Hotel, as if hoping that its proximity to the financial doings of London’s City would cure his hangover with a shot of Anglo mercantilism. Sobriety was desperately needed: Cohen had talked him into a trip to Auschwitz some thirty hours later. “For my essays,” he had said.

Vladimir spent the day in the bathtub, alternately soaking himself then getting up to shower. It was a beast to behold, this shower: four separate heads that attacked from all angles: a regular spray from on top, a drip by shoulder level, a fountain straight to the hip, and a risqué geyser that rammed into Vladimir’s genital area (to be used sparingly, that one). When he was dizzy from shower, Vladimir would sink back into the tub and thumb through the
Herald Tribune,
which thankfully had little to say that day, much like Vladimir himself.

With darkness only a few hours away, Vladimir dried his newly plump little body and started dressing for the evening. Morgan was still passed out, her behind lifting and falling slowly beneath the sheets in keeping with her subdued breath; she was dreaming
perhaps of her terrorism or some long-dead family pet. After admiring this sight for a bit Vladimir gazed out the window where he could see a sliver of the Thames and a rain-soaked shoulder of St. James. Part of the view was taken up by a lonely skyscraper off in the distance, which, Vladimir had read in the hotel’s glossy literature, was a new development called Canary Wharf, billed as the tallest building in Europe. An architectural nostalgic, Vladimir recalled one of the last times he had spent with Baobab, sitting up on his friend’s roof, looking at the lone tower they were building across the East River in Queens.

He watched the Wharf for an indeterminate amount of time, letting himself be taken back to the days when Challah and Baobab could still count as the sum total of his affections; when through their failings he could draw comparative strength; when that childish feeling of superiority had been enough to sustain him. By the end of this reverie he found that his mobile had crawled into his hand. The dial tone hummed, indicating that the phone had been engaged.

He had forgotten Baobab’s number, although once it was etched into his memory along with his social security number—both were now casualty to the passage of time and the efficacy of Stolovan spirits. The only connection he was still capable of making across the Atlantic was to Westchester, and for that, too, the time had come.

Mother, woken up from her deep weekend slumber, could only conjure up her requisite
“Bozhe moi!”

“Mother,” said Vladimir, amazed at how superfluous that word had become to his insane life, when only three years ago it had prefaced nearly every utterance.

“Vladimir, get out of Prava now!”

How did she know he had moved to Prava? “Pardon—”

“Your friend Baobab called. The Italian boy. I could not
understand him, he is beyond understanding, but you are obviously in danger . . .” She paused to catch her breath. “Something about a fan, a man with a fan, he’s determined to murder you and Russians are involved. Your dimwitted friend has been trying to reach you frantically and so have I, but the operator in Prava knows nothing of you, as can be expected . . .”

“The man with the fan,” Vladimir said. He had wanted to say Fan Man, but it could not be said in Russian precisely that way. “Rybakov?”

“That is what I think he said. You must call him right now. Or better yet, get on the next plane out of Prava. You can even charge the ticket to my American Express account. It’s that important!”

“I’m not in Prava,” Vladimir said. “I’m in London.”

“London!
Bozhe moi!
Every Russian mafioso has a flat in London now. So it’s just like I suspected . . . Oh, Vladimir, please come back home, we won’t make you go to law school, I promise. You can live in the house and do whatever you want, I can get you a promotion at the resettlement agency, now that I’m on the board. And, this may come as a pleasant surprise, but we’ve put away a nice sum of money in the past ten years. We must have, I don’t know . . . Two, three, fourteen million dollars. We can afford to give you a little stipend, Vladimir. Maybe five thousand a year plus subway tokens. You can live at home and do whatever it is you young, listless people do. Smoke pot, paint, write, whatever they taught you at that fucking liberal arts school, devil confound all those hippies. Just please come back, Vladimir. They’ll kill you, those Russian animals! You’re such a weak, helpless boy, they’ll wrap you in a blin and have you for supper.”

“Okay, calm down, stop crying. Everything is fine. I’m safe in London.”

“I’m not crying,” Mother said. “I’m too agitated to cry!” But then she broke down and started weeping with such force that
Vladimir put down the phone and turned to Morgan, her form stirring beneath the blankets in response to the loudness and urgency of his voice.

“I will call Baobab now,” he said quietly, “and if there’s truly danger, then I’ll be on the next plane to the States. I know what to do, Mother. I’m not stupid. I’ve become a very successful businessman in Prava. I was just about to send you a brochure of my new investment group.”

“A businessman without an M.B.A.,” sniffled Mother. “We all know what kind of businessman that is.”

“Did you hear what I said, Mother?”

“I hear you, Vladimir. You’ll call Baobab—”

“And I’m going to be perfectly safe. Forget about this being-eaten-in-a-blin business. Such nonsense! All right? I’m dialing Baobab now. Good-bye . . .”

“Vladimir!”

“What?”

“We still love you, Vladimir . . . And . . .”

“And?”

“ . . . And your grandmother died two weeks ago.”

“Babushka?”

“Your father nearly had a nervous collapse between her death and your stupidity. He’s upstate right now, recovering with his fishing. The medical practice is losing money, but what can you do in such a situation? I had to let him go upstate.”

“My grandmother . . .” Vladimir said.

“ . . . has left for the other world,” Mother completed. “They had her on the tubes for a few weeks, but then she died fast. Her face looked like she was in pain when she lapsed into a coma, but the doctors said that it didn’t necessarily mean she was suffering.”

Vladimir leaned himself against the cold window. Grandmother. Running after him with her fruit and farmer cheese at
their old mountain
dacha
. “Volodechka!
Essen!
” That crazed, dear woman. To think that now the rectangle that had been his family had suddenly, with the subtraction of a single, flat EKG line, been reconfigured into a tiny triangle. To think there were only three Girshkins left. “The funeral?” Vladimir asked.

“Very nice, your father cried an ocean. Listen, Vladimir, get on the phone with Baobab already. Your grandmother was old, life for her was not life anymore, especially with you gone from it. Oh, how she loved you . . . So, just say a prayer for her soul, and for your father, too, and for my suffering heart, and for this whole wretched family of ours on which the Lord has chosen to heap only calamity these past two quarters . . . Now go!”

IT TOOK TWELVE
rings but finally the tired, husky voice came on, sounding as unhappy as a government worker caught at his desk immediately after the five o’clock bell. “Baobab residence.”

“Is there a Baobab I could speak to?” Vladimir said. His friend’s demented greeting made him smile. Baobab remained Baobab.

“It’s you! Where are you? Never mind! Turn on CNN! Turn on CNN! It’s starting already! Jesus Christ!”

“What the hell are you yelling about? Why does it always have to be hysteria. Why can’t we have a normal—”

“That friend of yours with the fans, the one we had the citizenship for.”

“How now?”

“He barged into Challah’s, into your old apartment last week. He woke us up—”

“Us?”

Baobab sighed a long, pneumatic sigh. “After you left, Roberta married Laszlo,” he explained with aggravated patience. “They
went to Utah to unionize the Mormons. So . . . I guess . . . Challah and I were both lonely . . .”

“That’s great!” Vladimir said. With all of his selfish little heart he wished them the best. Even the idea of them having sex, the tremor of their two large bodies shaking the already shaky foundations of Alphabet City, inspired in Vladimir only joy. Good for them! “But what did Rybakov want?”

“Dah! It’s starting! It’s starting! Turn it on! Turn it on!”

“What’s starting?”

“CNN, idiot!”

Vladimir tiptoed his way into the living room, where the enormous black monolith that was the television had already been set to the news channel. He could hear the newscaster even before the picture materialized, the words
Breaking News—New York’s Mayoralty in Crisis
floating along the bottom of the screen.

“ . . . Aleksander Rybakov,” the newscaster was saying in midsentence. “But to most people, he is simply . . . The Fan Man.” The reporter was an unsmiling young woman in a provincial tweed suit, hair tied into a painful bun, teeth buffed into a reflective sheen. “We were first introduced to the Fan Man three months ago,” she continued, “when his many letters to the
New York Times
lambasting New York’s urban decay came to the attention of the city’s mayor.”

“Aaah!” Vladimir shouted. So he’d done it. He’d finally done it, that grizzly old loon.

Shot of a gilded banquet room, the mayor—a tall man with a square-set face that even two powerful jaws could not stretch into a smile—standing next to a hysterically grinning Rybakov, looking slim and polished in a three-piece banker’s suit. Above them a banner read: N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ELEBRATES THE
N
EWEST
N
EW
Y
ORKERS
.

MAYOR
: And when I look at this man, who has suffered such persecution in his homeland and has traveled three thousand miles just to speak out on the very same issues I believe in—on crime, on welfare, on the decline of civic society—well, I just have to think that despite all the naysayers, thank God for—

RYBAKOV
(spitting freely): Crime, tphoo! Welfare, tphoo! Civil society, tphoo!

NEWSCASTER
: Mr. Rybakov’s brash outspokenness and conservative stances certainly earned him many enemies among the city’s liberal elite.

GRAY-HAIRED BOW-TIED LIBERAL
(looking more tired than enraged): I object not so much to this so-called Fan Man’s simplistic views on race, class, and gender but to the whole spectacle of parading around a human being who is obviously in dire need of help just to serve a misguided political purpose. If this is the mayor’s idea of bread and circuses, New Yorkers are not amused.

RYBAKOV
shown behind a lectern, cradling a little fan, smiling, his eyes clouded over with pleasure, as he lovingly croons: “Faaan . . . Faaanichka. Sing ‘Moscow Nights’ for Kanal Seven, please.”

NEWSCASTER
: But the end came quickly when the mayor invited Mr. Rybakov to register to vote at an official City Hall ceremony. Television crews from around the country gathered to witness the much-ballyhooed “first vote” of the Fan Man’s life. The streets around City Hall were to be sealed off for the day for a “Fan Man Get-Out-the-Vote Block Party” complete with sturgeon and herring stands, the two staples of the Fan Man’s diet, provided courtesy of Russ & Daughters Appetizing.

MAYOR
(holding a piece of sturgeon between thumb and index
finger): I’m the grandson of immigrants. And my son is the great-grandson of immigrants. And I’ve always been proud of that. Now I want all you naturalized immigrants to go out there and vote today. If Mr. Rybakov can do it, so can you!

NEWSCASTER
: But only an hour before the ceremony was underway, reports leaked out from the mayoral administration that Mr. Rybakov was, in fact,
not
a citizen. INS records indicate that at a naturalization ceremony held last January, he had attacked Mr. Jamal Bin Rashid of Kew Gardens, Queens, while showering him with racial epithets.

MR. RASHID
(dressed in kaffiyeh, excited, speaking in front of his garden apartment): He is shouting at me, “Turk! Turk, go home!” And he’s hitting me on the head, baff! baff! with his, you know, with his crutch. Ask my wife, I am still not sleeping at night. My lawyer says: Sue! But I will not sue. Allah is all-forgiving and so am I.

Cut to Rybakov at a news conference surrounded by mayor’s aides, a
REPORTER
shouting, “Mr. Rybakov, is it true? Are you a liar and a psychopath?”

Slow-motion shot of Rybakov as he picks up his crutch then sends it flying across the room, where it neatly whacks the offending reporter in the head. Silent shots of melee, Rybakov being tackled by the mayor’s staff while the camera scrambles to get it all. Finally, the audio kicks in, and we hear
RYBAKOV
screaming: “I am citizen! I am America! Girshkin! Girshkin! Liar! Thief!”

NEWSCASTER
: Police experts were unable to identify the term “Girshkin,” but reliable sources tell us that no such word exists in the Russian language. Mr. Rybakov spent two weeks under observation at the Bellevue psychiatric center, while the mayor’s staff attempted damage control.

MAYORAL AIDE
(young, harried): The mayor reached out to this
man. He wanted to help. The mayor is deeply concerned with the plight of crazed World War II veteran refugees from the former Soviet Union.

NEWSCASTER
: But it is today’s investigative report by the
Daily News
documenting the fact that Mr. Rybakov, here shown at the helm of his thirty-foot speedboat, has been collecting SSI benefits while living in a palatial Fifth Avenue apartment that finally threatens to bring down the mayoral administration . . . We now go live to the mayor’s news conference . . .