Russian Debutante's Handbook (54 page)

“His cat should be turned into cat food!” Hurrah!

“And what do you think of twenty crowns for a carp?” another inquisitive
babushka
wanted to know.

“Disgrace! Why have we let the labor camps of Siberia go idle? And what about those nice Stolovan uranium mines? Comrades, when the Liberal Democratic Worker-Peasant Alliance of Unrepentant Communists takes control, these new entrepreneurs will
really
have their work cut out for them!”

The crowd lapsed into cheerful laughter and applause, gold teeth sparkled across the room, and more than one hand reached to calm the overexcited beating of a faulty heart. “We will take care of them one by one, dear
tovarishchii.
We will strangle the life out of them with our own bare hands, those fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits!”

Now, what can one say about coincidences? Either one believes in a higher power or one just shrugs. Looking back, Vladimir would concede that at that moment he was tempted to believe, for no sooner had the words “fat bourgeois pigs in their pinstriped Armani suits” escaped his mouth, than the Groundhog parted the velvet curtain and burst into the room, trailed closely by Gusev and the Log. Yes, they all had on their Armani pinstripes and were looking more porcine than ever, although perhaps the power of suggestion played some part in that.

“There they are!” shouted Vladimir, pointing, he thought, directly into the Groundhog’s solar plexus. “They’ve come to disrupt our dignified meeting! For the honor of the Fatherland, tear those pigs to shreds!”

The Groundhog tilted his head and sucked in his cheeks in amazement, as if to say,
“Et tu, Brute?”
Then an enormous kielbasa landed on his head and the crowd charged.

Vladimir did not witness all the weapons at their disposal, suffice to say crutches played a big part, but for him the most enduring scene of the melee, like war footage that gets played over and over again on the networks, was the sight of a plump matron in heels stabbing at Gusev’s heart with the business end of a sturgeon, shouting: “Is that hard enough for you, you crook?” while her confused victim pleaded for mercy.

And so, as old soldiers heaved metal chairs against the intruders, and sausages circled overhead like Sikorsky choppers, František hurried Vladimir toward an alternate exit to the embankment. “Brilliant!” was the single word he said, as he pushed him out into the noon light and slammed the door shut behind him.

Still full of revolutionary fervor, but now reminded of more pressing matters, Vladimir ran down the embankment chasing a departing taxi. “Halt, comrade!” he was shouting out of habit.

The taxi squealed in compliance and Vladimir heaved himself inside with a crack of something internal. “Oh, for the love of God . . .” He sneezed, and two gushers of blood were released, one per nostril, the way one imagines a winning racehorse lets out fire at the finish line.

The driver—a teenager by the looks of him, his shaved head tattooed with the anarchist’s goofy “A”—caught sight of this blood-bath in the rearview. “Out, out,” cried the anarchist driver. “No blood in auto! No HIV! Out!”

A stack of a hundred hundred-dollar bills hit the back of the driver’s head (Vladimir had thrown it with such force that it left a momentary red trace on that great moony surface). The driver looked down at the stash. He threw the little Trabant into gear.

The way to the airport required a quick U-turn, which a car any
larger than a Trabant could not perform. In this respect, Vladimir was fortunate. In the respect that the U-turn took him straight into the Groundhog’s armada of BMWs and
mafiyosi
in retreat from the octogenarian Red Army, he was not.

His driver pressed on the horn dutifully and cursed as well, but with all the confusion up ahead he could not help but hit a large object, which Vladimir to his dying day would believe was Log. However, considering the glare of the afternoon sun and the blinding red flashes exploding around his corneas, he could have been wrong. It could have been a friend of the Log.

Nevertheless, the force of the impact steered the Trabant into the railing of the embankment. The Trabi, knowing a greater physical force when it crashed into one, bounced back into the street, saving Vladimir and his driver from a lapse into the river. A remarkable car, the Trabant! Such shyness and humility, such understated presence. Mother had always wanted Vladimir to marry a girl just like this Trabi.

“Car is dead!” the driver moaned, even as they made exceptional progress up the embankment and onto the bridge that snaked off from Prospekt Narodna. “Pay me!” Flustered and at the teenager’s mercy, Vladimir hit him with another ten thou, in response to which the driver pulled a confetti of wires and a single lightbulb out of the dashboard. This immediately sent the Trabant into heat: with terrific gusto and a transparent lack of regard for traffic signals they bounded through the Lesser Quarter and around Repin Hill.

A curtain of gray smoke rising from the Foot now blanketed the city, smoke as thick as the scalloped clouds one sees looking down from an airplane window. A premature night had descended upon Prava, coloring the spires and domes of the Old Town with an eerie industrial beauty.

By this point, the pain in Vladimir’s ribs was becoming acute.
He broke down in a fit of coughing. There was something in his throat, a thick string of coagulated blood, and he pulled at it, pulled until the whole food chain unwrapped itself from within his stomach and landed on the driver’s bald pate.

For a second his cause seemed lost; for a second it looked like he would have to walk it to the airport. But all the driver said, in the meek, bewildered way of a proud local boy suddenly covered in a Westerner’s innards, was, “Pay me.” When the money fell alongside him, he gunned the engine once more.

Looking down at the city below them, Vladimir could see the BMW caravan making its way up the hill, one car on the heels of the next, forming a dark-blue river not unlike the Tavlata, except flowing a great deal more energetically and up the slope of Repin Hill. Vladimir shuddered, amazed at the power of the organization to which he once belonged, although a chain of luxury German automobiles was perhaps its most potent manifestation. Unless, of course, every link in that chain was strafing you with gunfire.

This happened a good ten minutes hence. The Trabant had quit the other side of Repin Hill and emerged onto the main highway leading out of the city. Vladimir was suffering from a dizzying attack of blood and tears. He was leaning his head back to keep the blood down and whispering to himself his father’s “no-tears” manifesto, when a bullet took out the back window of the Trabi. The tiny shards of glass drew fine red lines on the back of the driver’s head, complementing (rather befittingly) the tattooed “A,” symbol of the anarchists. “Ah!” shouted the driver. “Artillery is shooting to death car and Jaroslav! Pay me!”

Vladimir crept down into the pool of his own blood. The driver, Jaroslav, swerved into a no-man’s land between the guardrails and the freeway proper. The thin Trabant squeezed past a trailer truck in front of them bearing the logo of a Swedish modular-furniture company.

Shell-shocked, Vladimir crawled back up to look through the nonexistent window behind him. The Swedish furniture truck now separated their car from the Groundhog’s shooting party like some kind of ad hoc U.N. reaction force. But the Hog’s men apparently had no respect for Swedish furniture. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students, they continued to shoot as the truck swerved madly to stay on the road. Finally, their labors produced results—with an audible whoosh, the back doors of the truck blew away.

A houseful of Krovnik dining tables in assorted colors, Skanör solid-beech glass-door cabinets, Arkitekt retractable work lamps (with adjustable heads), and the daddy of them all—a Grinda three-piece sofa ensemble in “modern paisley,” came sailing out of the back of the truck and onto the flotilla of BMWs to settle once and for all the Russo-Swedish War of 1709.

THEY PULLED UP
to the departure terminal. Vladimir, in a gesture of last-minute good will, threw another ten grand at Jaroslav, who slapped Vladimir’s sweat-soaked back, and, his own eyes now tearing, shouted: “Run, J.R.! One car still follows us!”

He ran, absentmindedly wiping the blood off his nose onto the already bloodied hand bandage. He slapped his passport on the desk of the half-awake security team guarding the departure gate. At that formal moment, his briefcase, stuffed with about fifty thousand dollars and a gun, came to mind. “Oh, pardon me,” said the ever-vigilant Vladimir. He hobbled over to the nearest trash can, sheepishly took out the gun, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, deposited that useless item within. “Don’t even ask about the gun,” he said to the nice, walrus-mustached gentlemen in dark green. “What a long day!”

“American?” said the security commandant, a tall individual, fit
and lean, a shock of white hair beneath his beret. It was more of a statement than a question. With a minimum of malice, he told Vladimir to keep his blood-soaked hands off the spotless white counter, then stamped a childish picture of a departing plane into the passport and waved Vladimir through the gate. With ten minutes until departure, Vladimir prepared for a final sprint.

Directly behind him, Gusev and the Groundhog were running up to the security counter, buttoning up their double-breasters, straightening their ties, and shouting in Russian: “Stop the criminal in the bloodied shirt! The little criminal, stop him!”

Vladimir stopped, as if frozen by these hurtful words, but the security detail hardly turned around. “We don’t speak Russian here,” the commandant announced in Stolovan as the others laughed approval.

“Stop the international terrorist!” Gusev was hollering, still in the wrong tongue.

“Passport!” the chief hollered back at them in the international language of border police about to get more than a little surly.

“Soviet citizens don’t need passports!” cried the Groundhog, and, in a final suicidal gesture, leapt for the departure gate and Vladimir.

Vladimir continued to stand there, transfixed by the gaze in the eyes of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the crooked gaze of the same hatred, lunacy, and, in the end, hopelessness, that his father, the Fan Man, had worn like a badge . . . And then the eye contact was broken by so many swinging batons, well-aimed kicks in the groin, and an older man in uniform bent over the Groundhog and Gusev shouting revenge for the Soviet incursion of 1969.

“Oh, my poor people,” said Vladimir suddenly as the violence commenced. Why had he said this? He shook his head. Stupid heritage. Dumb multicultural Jew.

Among the few last passengers ascending the stairs, he did not even recognize Morgan. Foolishly, he was looking for her bright face
to stand out with the luminance of a supernova, for a great, preternatural shout of “Vladi!” to shake the tarmac. Lacking all of the above, he ran nonetheless . . . Ran the way he was taught by Kostya and by life, ran toward her, toward the hum of jet engines, the sparkle of the sun on metal wings softly shaking, the unbearable sight of yet another landscape falling away beneath him as if none of it had ever happened.

He ran—there was not even the time to lie to himself that he would be back. And lies had always been important to our Vladimir, like childhood friends with whom one never loses an understanding.

I am playing an accordion on a busy thoroughfare

It’s too bad that happy birthday comes just once a year.

—The Russian Birthday Song
(as sung by a cheerless cartoon crocodile)

IT HAD BEEN
impossible to sleep through the night. A summer storm had been steadily fortifying itself outside, trying to beat its way through the storm windows and stucco with a baleful announcement of Vladimir’s thirtieth birthday, just what he would expect from Nature’s cruel Ohio franchise.

Now, morning in the kitchen, barely seven o’clock, and sleepy Vladimir is eating his cereal with fruit. He spends half an hour watching the strawberries bloody his milk, while submerging his banana with perverse glee. One of Morgan’s gigantic brown hairs, trapped in the doors of a kitchen cabinet, is blown in an upward arc by a draft from the window like an index finger beckoning Vladimir.

Mornings are lonely nowadays.

Morgan, on leave from the clinic where she interns, is still asleep, her hands wrapped protectively around her spherical belly, which already seems to rise and lift independent of her breathing. Her eyes are teary and swollen from pollen season, her face is getting fuller and perhaps a little less kind in preparation for the third decade of her life. Unable to hear her from the kitchen, Vladimir listens to the house breathe, enjoying, the way his father always did, the imagined safety of the American home. Today, it is the inspired hum of some sort of electrical generator buried deep in the house’s subbasement, a hum that sometimes pitches itself into a roar, making the dishes chime in the dishwasher.

“Time to go,” Vladimir announces to the kitchen machinery and the curtains billowing with embroidered sunflowers over the sink.

HE DRIVES AROUND
the tattered ends of his neighborhood where the overbearing single-family dwellings of the kind in which he lives give way to the rowhouses of the interwar era—charcoal black either by design or by the industry ringing the city, who can tell? Already, scraps of morning traffic are filling up the intersections; the Ohioans slowing down to let mommies and children cross. Vladimir, in the plush cocoon of his luxury utility vehicle, is listening to the scratchy wail of the Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky—it is his favorite morning song, set in a Soviet mental asylum where the inmates have just discovered the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle on a television variety show and are full of disturbing suggestions. (“We shall drink up the Triangle!” cries a recovering alcoholic.)

And then, with a cloying twitter, the harbinger of annoyance, his car phone rings. Vladimir looks at it with uncertainty. Eight o’clock in the morning. It is time for the familiar birthday greetings, Mother’s annual
State of the Vladimir
address. From atop her
glassed-in skyscraper in New York, the celebratory shouting begins: “Dearest
Volodechka!
Happy birthday . . . ! Happy ne w beginning . . . ! Your father and I wish you a brilliant future . . . ! Much success . . . ! You’re a talented young man . . . ! We gave you everything as a child . . . !”