Russian Debutante's Handbook (50 page)

His eyes met those of the tour guide who smiled and nodded as if this meeting had been prearranged. “Hi,” he said to Vladimir, his voice trembling even for the duration of that minuscule syllable.

“Hello,” Vladimir said. He brought up his hand in a formal gesture of greeting. He tried to recall instantly what it meant to look “grave,” but knew he couldn’t pull it off on the spot, not with the tumult of the past few days under his belt. He continued with his shit-eating grin.

“Hello,” answered the tour guide as he filed past Vladimir. His elderly charges followed. With the ice seemingly broken by their leader, they were now able to look Vladimir briefly in the eye and even manage a little sympathetic smile. Only the middle-aged woman, the one who had dared to photograph Vladimir, the Live Jew of Birkenau, had increased her pace while staring resolutely ahead.

Thank you, come again, Vladimir thought to say, but instead he sighed, looked once more at the departing mane of the thoughtful young tour guide—his better in every aspect, despite the rotting branches of the German’s family tree—and considered yet again his own relative loss of place in this world; his irrevocable perdition.

Ah, and where now, Vladimir Borisovich?

He began his long, pensive trudge to the pond of human ashes, where his friends were already waiting for him, Cohen aghast by
both the tour group and the ashes, Morgan solely by the ashes. Perhaps she could get Tomaš and Alpha to blow up the remains of Birkenau as well. Just a few more kilos of C4 and they could
really
take care of history.

And then his mobile phone rang.

“Well, well,” said the Groundhog.

“Please don’t kill me,” Vladimir blurted out.

“Kill you?” The Groundhog laughed. “Kill my clever goose? Oh, please, friend. We all knew what kind of character you were from the start. Anyone who can bamboozle half of America can surely fuck over my old man.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Vladimir whimpered. “I love your father. I love—”

“Okay, can you please shut up,” the Groundhog moaned. “All is forgiven, just stop crying. Now, I need you back in Prava. We’ve got a strange new scheme going here.”

“Scheme,” Vladimir mumbled. What the hell was going on in the Hog’s little mind? “A strange new scheme . . .”

“Strange precisely because it isn’t a scheme. A
legitimate
venture,” the Groundhog explained. “A brewery in South Stolovaya that looks ready to expand into West European and American markets.”

“Legitimate venture,” Vladimir repeated. His mind was barely functioning. “Did Kostya advise you of this?”

“No, no, it’s all me,” the Groundhog said. “And you can’t let anyone know about this, not even Kostya. Especially about the fact that it’s aboveboard. I don’t want to be a laughingstock.” He then invited Vladimir to come out the following week and look over the brewery. “Without your professional opinion no venture can be consummated,” he said. “Legitimate or otherwise.”

“I will never betray you again,” Vladimir whispered.

The Groundhog laughed once more, a soft chortle far removed from his usual boisterous braying. Then he hung up.

ON THE WAY
to the southern brewery their caravan had passed seemingly the entire unremarkable oeuvre of the Stolovan landscape. Only one mountain, a compact trapezoid indistinguishable from its neighbors, drew Vladimir’s attention, for Jan announced in a proud, instructive tone that this was the mountain on which the Stolovan nation had originated. Vladimir was impressed. What a comfort to know the mountain from which your kind had once come hollering down! He imagined that if the Russians had had such a mountain it would be a great, sweeping Everest out in the Urals on which a military surveillance base would promptly be built, its RKO-style antennas arching into the heavens, announcing that the sons and daughters of the Kievan Rus had laid claim to the taiga and its grizzly bears, the Baikal and its sturgeons, the shtetl and its Jews.

The only other point of interest on their way to the brewery was a half-built nuclear power plant on the outskirts of town, its cooling towers rising over a vast field of failing carrots in long spirals of unfinished skeletal grating, as if the meltdown had already occurred.

The brewery town itself was a charmless little burg where the steeples of Gothic churches, the mansions of the leading merchants, indeed the town square itself had long been cleared away
for a claustrophobic quadrant of graying buildings, each nearly identical, even if one was a hotel, the other an administrative center, the third a hospital. They drove straight to the hotel, its lobby a furry seventies affair crammed with prickly recliners, stale air, naked legs, and, in an homage to the leading employer of the locality, a sparkling vat of the local beer rising out of the shag carpeting like a lone Easter Island–head statue. But upstairs, in the Executive Wing (as the rooms with the
brass
doorknobs were designated), Vladimir felt a thrill of apparatchik camaraderie—these rust-colored, bric-a-brac-less quarters surely must have housed their share of Light Bulb Factory #27 directors and similar happy-go-lucky communist officials. If only František was here!

Not that Vladimir lacked Soviet residue among his traveling companions: He was accompanied by the Groundhog, Gusev, and two fellows who routinely passed out before the meat course was served at the
biznesmenski
lunches and were rumored to be the Groundhog’s best friends from his Odessa days. One was a small hairless fellow who kept badgering Vladimir about the efficacy of minoxidil. His name was Shurik. The other one was called the Log, and looking at his withered, combative face—nine-tenths scowl, one-tenth eyebrow—one could easily see him floating lifeless down a river, belly up, blood trailing from the nail-thin indenture in the back of the head.

Perhaps better company can be had if one knows where to find it, but Vladimir, newly happy and secure, was as excited as the first-time hostess of a slumber party. Why, even Gusev, who had once almost killed him, seemed a lion tamed as of late. On the ride in, for example, he had bought Vladimir a pastry from a roadside restaurant. Then, with all the grandness and civility befitting the Hapsburg Court, he had let Vladimir cut in front of him on the line for the pissoir.

And so, with the world once again revolving in his direction, Vladimir was seen running about the hallways as if on spring
break, shouting in a sparkling Russian: “Come see, gentlemen . . . A Coke machine that also dispenses rum!”

His room came with a pair of twin beds and Vladimir half hoped the Groundhog would split it with him so they could stay up late, smoking noxious Mars-20 cigarettes, drinking from the same bottle, shooting the breeze about NATO expansion and loves lost. And indeed, with collegiate bravado, the Groundhog soon stuck his head into the doorway and said: “Hey, wash up, you little Yid, and we’ll hit the bar across the square. We’ll rape and pillage, eh?”

“I’m there!” cried Vladimir.

THIS WAS SOME
bar. It was run by the local union in the basement of the former Palace of Culture and was habituated by the workers who were laboring on the nuclear power plant, and had probably been doing so since around the time Vladimir was born. Seven o’clock and already mad, hallucinatory inebriation had set in across the board. And then, as if the limits of human endurance were not yet pronounced exhausted, the whores were sent in.

The
prostitutki
in this part of the world formed a stylized labor brigade. Every one around five feet, nine inches in height, as if that particular span had been adjudged most convenient for the local boys; hair hennaed till it had the consistency of a well-worn mop; breasts and bellies, stretched by births bulging corsets a dirty mauve in color. They shimmied up to the dance floor without much enthusiasm and then, in a tradition that has become
diktat
in the eight formerly Soviet time zones—Lights! Disco ball! ABBA!

Vladimir’s crew had only uncapped their first beer when the whores arrived and disco fever struck. The Groundhog and his boys immediately got giggly on the scene, fingering the Polo insignia on their shirts, mumbling, “Oh, the country folk,” as if they were having a Chekhov moment of their own.

“These women have thighs that can squeeze the life out of you,” noted little Shurik, not without appreciation.

“But this beer,” Vladimir said. “It tastes like they keep a rusty nail in the bottle.
This
is the brewery that will export to the West?”

“Pour some vodka into it,” the Groundhog said. “Look, it even suggests it on the bottle.”

Vladimir looked over the label. Part of it did seem to read: “For best results add vodka, 6 ml.” Or maybe this was the complex name of the brewery, one could never tell with the Stolovans. “Fine,” Vladimir said and went to get a bottle of Kristal from the bar.

An hour later he was dancing to “Dancing Queen” with the prettiest
fille de nuit
in the house. She was the only one that did not tower above Vladimir, and that wasn’t all that set her apart from her colleagues: She was young (although not “only seventeen,” like the dancing queen of the title), she was lanky and especially lean in the chest, and, most significantly, her eyes did not have that staged good-humored look of the other whores. No, these were the clear, disinterested eyes of a New York debutante with poor grades sent to a college in West Virginia, or else a teenager in a contemporary advertisement for jeans. Even through his considerable inebriation—for do not think that vodka, when deposited in beer, creates a neutralizing reaction—Vladimir felt an affinity with this young, damaged apprentice to the trade. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Teresa,” she said in a mean, hoarse whisper, as if she was spitting the name out of her mouth forever.

“Vladimir,” he said and bent down to kiss her speckled neck, aiming for a slot between the carefully spaced hickeys left by others.

But he didn’t get a chance to pounce. The Groundhog had swept him aside with one apelike swoop, and attached him to the dancing
triad of Groundhog, Gusev, and the Log. They had left their three prostitutes behind (all substantial middle-aged ladies drowning in blush) and were asserting their Russianness with a kind of abbreviated Cossack dance. Crouch together, rise together, kick out one foot, kick out the other . . . “Opa!” shouted the prostitutes, their faces as red-and-white as the Polish flag. “Faster, little dove!” they encouraged Vladimir.

But it was out of Vladimir’s hands. The force of the drunken Groundhog, pulling, pushing, swinging, squatting, was entirely responsible for Vladimir’s own sorry movements. The Groundhog was a florid mass with a coherence all its own, giving generously to the reverie around him, shouting, “One more time, brothers! For the Motherland!”

At his first opportunity, Vladimir yelled, “Bathroom!” and ran for cover.

In the piss house, the union had just installed automatic flushers from Germany and mirrors over the urinals. Taking advantage of this march of progress, Vladimir groomed himself: He pushed down his wild hair and tried to string the most wayward locks into loops behind his ears; he opened his mouth and examined his slick, ivory teeth; he pulled back his hairline and promised to himself to sacrifice a goat to the makers of the hair tonic minoxidil. He said to himself:
Of course, I’m not going to fall in love with a prostitute,
and headed out.

By this time the ABBA selection had settled on “Chiquitita,” which, drunk or not, is a terribly difficult song to dance to. Consequently, the ranks of dancers were decaying; the picniclike tables around the dance floor began filling up with the
prostitutki
and their men. But nowhere could Vladimir spot the Groundhog and his crew, not to mention his young whore. Feeling abandoned and with no place to invest his excitement, Vladimir went to refill
his bladder at the bar.
“Dobry den’,”
he told the tanned young bartender dressed in a tank top depicting an alligator playing with an American football.

“Hi, friend,” said the barkeep in near-perfect English, as if the waves of the Pacific were stroking the sands of Malibu outside. “What can I do for you?”

Vladimir enumerated a lengthy list of booze while the bartender carefully looked him over. “Tell me, where did you come from?” he finally asked.

Vladimir told him.

“I have been there,” the barkeep said and shrugged, obviously not impressed by the City on the Hudson. He moved on to another customer, a worker wearing nothing but a desperate grin and a cap of a striking blue color.

When he returned with the beer portion of Vladimir’s request, Vladimir asked about his friends. “Went for a smoke outside,” said the globetrotting mixologist. He bent down to Vladimir’s level and now a most non-Californian scent could be detected from beneath his lanky arms. He said: “I have a note for you. But it’s not from me, you understand?” He said this in a tone grave enough to indicate that Vladimir’s response was necessary before the note was given.

“I understand,” Vladimir said with the same gravity, only inwardly he was excited, for he believed it to be a love note from his prostitute, and he was deeply interested in the kind of seductions she would deploy and in what form and language. He took the small, folded ribbon of purple paper from the barkeep, who immediately galloped off to the other end of the bar, and unfurled it. A carefully drawn gunsight stared back at Vladimir, and beneath in boxy letters the familiar bilingual legend:

AUSLANDER RAUS! FOREIGNER OUT!

It was signed collectively, “The Stolovan Skinheads.”

Vladimir did not say, “Ah . . .” He was on his feet and walking toward the exit. The soft flesh of prostitutes, the pungency of their perfume and hair, was an obstacle course he negotiated with partial success, saying along the way, “pardon, pardon, pardon . . .” But he was thinking,
Skinheads? Where? Who? The workers? They have hair.
A pace or two from the door he finally saw them out of the corner of his eye—the black military jackets, the camouflage pants, ankle-high boots; the faces didn’t even register.