Russian Debutante's Handbook (20 page)

“The two of us can never meet in person,” he was saying loudly now. “We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.”

Tree. Their Tree?
The
Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour.

“Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to . . .” But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. “Vladimir, dear, hi!” Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. “Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?”

Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. “Prava,” he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers.

“Prava, how very now!” Roberta said. “Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other . . . There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava . . . What can I do? . . . There’s an old Russian sailor . . . An old lunatic . . . He needs to be naturalized.”

There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. “It’s a long story . . .” he began, “but essentially . . . I need to . . . Oh God, what’s wrong with me?”

“Talk to me, you big bear!” Roberta encouraged him.

“Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.”

“Okay, then,” Roberta said. “I
definitely
can’t get him his citizenship.”

“No,” Vladimir concurred. “No, you can’t.” What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old?

“But,” Roberta said, “I can get him the next best thing . . .”

THE TREE WAS
a rather frail and trampled-upon oak, its gnarly branches shadowing its equally beat-up cousin, the Bench. Tree and Bench existed together, now and forever, in the little park in back of the math-and-science high school where Vladimir and Baobab were issued an academic challenge and where, subsequently, they had failed to meet that challenge, and, instead, had retired to the Bench beneath the Tree. During a particularly upsetting acid trip, Baobab had carved his initials and those of Michel Foucault into the Bench, beneath which, in the style of lower-school girls, he had written, “BFF.” Best Friends Forever.

Vladimir, pining for the simplicity of those wasted days, bent down and traced the initials with one nostalgic finger, then held himself in check: Such nonsense!

A car horn went off behind him.

Roberta was peeking out of a cab door, waving her big yellow boater. “Get in!” she shouted. “They’re trailing Baobab uptown. Move!”

THEY HAD PULLED
up to an old warehouse by the Holland Tunnel. The place was a low-ceilinged affair, its torn parapet floors patched up with strips of linoleum, a sign for Arrow Moving and Storage, the previous tenant, incompletely scraped off the front door. Vladimir was seated with Roberta in the rear section, which was roped off for “Guests of Naturalization Candidates.” The other “guests,” all marvelous actors and dear friends of Roberta, as was explained to Vladimir, looked dressed for a wedding, an Islamabad or Calcutta wedding—the number of turbans and saris among the attendees had reached critical mass. At any rate, gone was the dark-T-shirt-and-tight-trouser uniform germane to the ranks of young unemployed thespians.

It was a festive atmosphere: the handsome men and women milled about, playing with the balloons, arguing over coffee brands and whether moving to Queens was a viable alternative to a social life.

“What each of them wouldn’t do to get into Laszlo’s bunk,” Roberta said, while keeping one clammy hand upon Vladimir’s. She wore a manly herringbone suit and a transparent white shirt over a black bra of elaborate construction which brought out and augmented her meager bosom. Her hair had been tied back with little ribbons of silk, and her gaunt cheeks rouged. There was no mistaking her for a sixteen-year-old unless she opened her mouth and exposed her ironwork. “I,” she announced to Vladimir, pointing at her name tag, “am Katerina Nieholtz-Praga, scion of an old Austrian family, and wife of the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga. Al is getting his citizenship today, but purely for business purposes, you understand. His heart is still in Tuscany, with his olive farm, his two Arabians, and his mamma.”

“God help us all,” Vladimir said. He sat, stooped and unshaven, in a huge sports jacket Roberta had brought for the occasion. He
had tried shaving in the bathroom of his room in the squalid Astoria motor lodge, which he had procured with his remaining fifty dollars, but found that he couldn’t keep his hands steady or his face still.

Laszlo walked out from the dressing room. He was a spindly gentleman, wearing a judge’s robe that barely reached down to his thighs, a sort of judicial miniskirt. Wisps of uncombed gray hair jutted out from his head in the shape of a lopsided crown. “Are you the client?” he asked Vladimir in remarkably clear English. He must have spent years scouring his Hungarian accent with steel wool. He probably couldn’t pronounce “paprika” at this point.

“That’s me,” Vladimir said. “How’s our man doing?”

“He’s real good, one hundred percent okay. Right now he’s in the dressing room, getting to know the other, you know, the citizens.” Laszlo folded his frame down to Vladimir’s level and put both hands on his shoulders; Vladimir flinched from recent experience.

“So,” Laszlo said, “this is our standard False Naturalization Ceremony Event, or FNCE, as we say in our industry. We do maybe a couple such events per year, and also a couple deluxe packages, which is the same thing but on a boat and with hookers.” And here Laszlo blinked, curling one tremendous brow. Roberta winked, too, and Vladimir, feeling the pressure, followed suit with a series of rapid blinking.

“Roberta said I can wire you the three thousand from Prava,” Vladimir spoke up.

“Yes, plus the FNCE standard package specialized one hundred percent lateness handling charge of an additional U.S. three thousand dollars. As per agreement!”

“I see,” Vladimir said. “Six thousand dollars.” The Hungarians were adapting to the free market quite nicely. He woud have to borrow some cash from Mr. Rybakov’s son. Still, it was nice of Roberta to fix this up on such short notice.

“Right,” Laszlo said. “Guests, assume your positions!”

The crowd of faux Zimbabweans, Ecuadorians, and the like scrambled over their folding chairs, brushing against one another and giggling. Laszlo climbed up the makeshift stage to his lectern, which was actually composed of several cardboard boxes expertly covered by an American flag and outfitted with a portable microphone. A colorful seal reading “Department of Justis” hung in the background, another excellent approximation, except for that slight misspelling and the somewhat frightened expression in the eye of the American eagle. “And now let us welcome the candidates for na-tu-ra-li-zation!” Laszlo boomed.

Applause from the guest sector as the candidates filed in one by one: Jewish and Anglo women in dark makeup and bizarrely overdone headdresses of grapes and mint leaves; men with wavy, blond hair and perfectly suburban physiognomies dressed as if they had just escaped from the set of
The Man of La Mancha,
and other such apparitions.

Mr. Rybakov hobbled in. He wore a dark blue suit, double-breasted and carefully tailored to minimize his paunch. Rows of red-and-yellow Soviet medals covered a great portion of his breasts, yet his tie sported the Stars and Stripes to accentuate his change of allegiance. He smiled inwardly, looking at the floor, trying to follow the footsteps of the kimono-clad woman in front of him.

Vladimir couldn’t help himself. Upon seeing the Fan Man he sprang to his feet and clapped the loudest, shouting with a Russian cheer,
“Ura! Ura, Aleksander!”
Roberta pulled on his jacket, reminding him that the point was not to get Rybakov riled up, but all the sailor did was smile meekly to acknowledge his friend, then took his seat beneath a giant crepe banner that read
CONGRATULATIONS
,
NEW AMERICANS
. They had parked him between the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga and another Caucasian-looking individual in order to avoid the previous incident with the Arab. However, in front of him sat a “Ghanaian” woman bearing a giant straw basket
of fruits on her head, likely obscuring part of his view. That had been an oversight.

They sang the anthem, then Judge Laszlo rose and brushed his hand against his eyes, deeply affected by this particular rendition. “America!” Laszlo said and nodded with understanding.

“America!” Rybakov shouted from his seat, nodding similarly. He turned around to give Vladimir an upturned thumb.

Laszlo smiled at the Fan Man and pressed one finger to his mouth for quiet. “America!” he repeated. “As you can tell from my accent, I too once sat where now you sit. I came as a small child to this country, learned the language, the customs, worked my way through, ah, judge school, and now am most privileged to help you complete your long journey to American citizenship.”

There was spontaneous applause during which the Fan Man got up and shouted: “I come to Vienna first, then I go to America!”

Laszlo waved at him to sit down. He put his finger to his lips once again. “What is America?” he resumed, spreading his shoulders, looking up to the stained ceiling in wonderment. “Is it a hamburger? Is it a hot dog? Is it a shiny new Cadillac with a pretty young woman underneath a palm tree . . . ?”

The guests shrugged and looked at each other. So many choices.

“Yes, America is all this,” Laszlo explained. “But it is more, much more.”

“I collect Social Security,” announced Mr. Rybakov, waving a hand for recognition.

Laszlo ignored him this time. “America,” he continued, both robed arms swinging through the air, “is a land where you can live a very long life and when it is time to die, when you look at yourself, you can say definitely: all the mistakes, all the triumphs I have had, all the Cadillacs and the pretty women, and the children that hate me so much they call me by my first name and not ‘daddy’ and not even ‘father,’ this is all because of me. Me!”

Laszlo’s students agreed, vigorously doffing their sombreros and waving around their kente cloth, repeating among themselves, “Me! Me!”

“This part of the Stanislavsky Method I don’t quite recognize,” Vladimir said.

“Ignoramus,” Roberta said.

The oath of allegiance was administered, the Fan Man mumbling right along, careful not to turn on his fellow candidates during the “all enemies, foreign and domestic” bit. Finally, they were called upon to get their certificates: “Efrat Elonsky . . . Jenny Woo . . . Abdul Kamus . . . Ruhalla Khomeni . . . Phuong Min . . . Aleksander Rybakov . . .”

Rybakov went up to the podium, dropped his crutches, and draped his arms around Laszlo who nearly buckled under the weight. “Thank you, Mister,” he whispered in his ear. He turned to Vladimir and waved his certificate through the air, his eyes streaming. “Ura!” he shouted. “Ura to America! I am America!” Vladimir waved back and took a snapshot with the Fan Man’s Polaroid. Despite the Ghanaian woman distributing ceremonial fruits from the basket on her head, despite Roberta loudly smooching the dapper Alberto Praga, yes, despite it all, Vladimir found himself moved. He blew his nose into the coarse, acrylic handkerchief that came with Roberta’s sports jacket and waved his little American flag made of a similar fabric.

THEY DIPPED PRETZELS
into the baked salmon salad which Laszlo’s crew had spread out over the time-worn aluminum desks left over from the moving company. “This is not very much,” Mr. Rybakov said to Vladimir. “We can go home. I have herring.”

“Oh, I’ve eaten enough of your fish,” Vladimir said.

“Shut your mouth,” Rybakov said. “All the fish in the Caspian
Sea would not be tribute enough for you, young King Solomon. Do you know what it has been like for me all these years? Do you know what it is like, to be a man without a country?”

Vladimir reached far across a table for another container of salmon, determined not to show his betrayal. And, yes, he knew what it was like.

“What if there is a war?” asked Mr. Rybakov. “How will you defend your motherland if you don’t have one?”

“That’s right, you can’t,” Vladimir said.

“Look at me, for example. I’m all alone in this country, I’ve got no family, no friends to speak of. You—you’re going to Prava. The Fan—all I had was the Fan, but now I have this!” He took the certificate out of his jacket pocket. “Now, I am a citizen of the greatest country in the world, if you discount Japan. Listen, I’m not young anymore, I’ve seen just about everything a man can see, so I know how it is: you’re born, you die, there’s nothing to it. You have to belong somehow, to be a part of a unit. Otherwise, what are you? You’re nothing.”

“Nothing,” repeated Vladimir. Laszlo was pointing to a clock. The show was almost over.

“But you, Vladimir, my dear young man, in Prava you will be part of something so big, so tight, you will never again have to wonder what unit you belong to. My son will take care of you like his own. And after I finish those business dealings with Miss Harosset and these damn Kandunsky paintings, may they all go to the devil, I will come and visit you and my Tolya. How about that?”

“We will have a great time, the three of us,” Vladimir said, picturing them rowing down a river with a basket of fried chicken and a jar of herring.