Russian Debutante's Handbook (24 page)

And then Vladimir looked down. He had picked up the expression “sea of spires” from some travel brochure back at the airport’s
tourist office, and while there were certainly golden spires reflecting the late-summer sun in the architectural stew below, it seemed rather partial of the pamphlet to fail to mention the sloping red roofs landsliding down the hill and into the gray bend of water that Kostya pointed out as the Tavlata River. Or the enormous pale-green domes on both sides of the river capping massive Baroque churches. Or the tremendous Gothic powder towers, strategically spread out along the cityscape, like dark medieval guards protecting the town from the usual nonsense that had managed to consume so many European skylines throughout the years.

There was only one incongruous structure, giant and brooding in the background, but it single-handedly managed to cast a shadow over half the city. At first, Vladimir suspected it was an oversized powder tower blackened from years of use . . . Only . . . Well . . . No, one could no longer deny the painful truth. The structure was a kind of giant shoe, a galosh, to be exact. “What is it?” Vladimir shouted to Kostya over ABBA.

“What? You’ve never heard of the Foot?” Kostya shouted back. “It’s quite a funny story, Vladimir Borisovich. Should I tell it?”

“Please, Konstantin Ivanovich,” Vladimir said. He had forgotten how he knew Kostya’s patronymic, but this salt-of-the-earth man was surely the son of an Ivan.

“Well, as soon as the war ended, you see, the Soviets built the world’s tallest statue of Stalin over Prava. It was really something. The entire Old Town was just sandwiched between Stalin’s two feet; it’s amazing he didn’t step on it.” Kostya rewarded his own joke with a little laughter. How he relished speaking to Vladimir! It was obvious to the latter that had Kostya been born in a saner time, a different country, he could easily have been a beloved schoolteacher in some gentle, slow-witted province.

“Then, after the Great One passed on,” Kostya continued, regaining his official didactic tone, “the Stolovans were allowed to
blow off his head and replace it with Khrushchev’s, which, I’m sure was a great consolation.
Finally,
two years after the Gabardine Revolution, the Stolovans managed to dynamite most of Nikita, but . . . Well, don’t ask me exactly what happened . . . Suffice to say, the fellows who won the Left Foot contract were last seen in St. Bart’s with Trata Poshlaya. Remember her? She was in
Come Home, Rifleman Misha,
and, oh, what was the one set in Yalta?
My Albatross.
”

“PravaInvest could dynamite the Foot,” Vladimir volunteered, momentarily forgetting his corporation’s unbearable lightness of being.

“It’s very costly,” Kostya cautioned him. “The Foot is right at the base of the Old Town. If you don’t use the explosives just right, you’ll blow half the city into the Tavlata.”

If PravaInvest couldn’t do it, then Vladimir vowed to mentally erase the Foot from his line of sight, even as it imposed its galosh-like shadow over the architectural grace of the cityscape.

Yes, giant foot aside, Prava continued to do its golden act beneath him, and then it dawned on Vladimir that this Prava was not without its charm; that while it was no
Weltstadt
like, say, Berlin, it was no shitty Bucharest either. Consequently, what if the Americans here were more the sophisticated Fran-and-Tyson variety than the deluded Baobab kind? Vladimir’s stomach grumbled with worry. Kostya, as if he had sensed Vladimir’s concerns, said: “A pretty town, yes? But New York must be still more beautiful.”

“Are you joking?” Vladimir said. They skipped a series of red lights and careened onto the tram rails of a bridge connecting the two parts of the city. Sparks flew and their driver cursed the Stolovans once more for their bloody infrastructure.

“Well,” said Kostya, ever the diplomat, “but New York must be bigger.”

“That’s right,” Vladimir said. “It’s the biggest.” But he was not reassured.

They swerved off the embankment and into a street lined with stately Baroque dwellings in various stages of disrepair yet still wearing their ornamentation, their gables and coats of arms standing out like the flounces on a worn Hapsburg gown.

“Stop here,” Kostya said. The driver slammed into the nearest stretch of sidewalk.

Outside, Vladimir did a little dance of happiness, a sort of cross between the jitterbug and the
kazachok,
feeling he could trust Kostya with this momentary lapse of reason. The Russian smiled sympathetically and said, “Yes, it’s a beautiful day.”

They found a café, one of the many from which white plastic tables reached out to the sidewalk, the tables covered with pork, dumplings, beer, and surrounded by Germans. Indeed, there were tourists everywhere. The Germans formed entire phalanxes of cheerful, drunk Swabians and purposefully striding Frankfurters. Teams of dazed Munich grandmothers on church trips staggered out of pubs to trample the yapping dachshunds being walked by their angry Stolovan counterparts: the
babushka
s. Upon first sight of them, Vladimir felt a kinship with these wizened survivors of both fascism and communism, whose city was clearly no longer their own, and who stared contemptuously from inside their meager headscarves at their bejeweled neighbors from across the border. He could easily picture his own grandmother in their place, except she would never consent to owning a hungry dog, preferring instead to feed her son extra portions.

But the Germans, although ubiquitous, were not alone. Clusters of stylish young Italians glided down the boulevard, trailing Dunhill smoke in their wake. A knot of Frenchwomen with identical buzz-cuts stood before a café menu, eyeing it skeptically. And finally Vladimir heard the sing-along of an American family, large and solid, arguing over whose turn it was to carry the goddamn
video camera. “But where are the
young
Americans?” he said to Kostya.

“The young ones don’t take the tourist route too often. Although you do see them on the Emanuel Bridge, singing and begging for money.”

“We don’t want the basket cases,” Vladimir said.

“Well, I do know of a popular expatriate café for you,” Kostya said, “but first we should celebrate your arrival with a drink. Yes?”

Yes. They picked up the drinks menu. “My God,” Vladimir said, “fifteen crowns for a cognac.”

Kostya explained to him how that amounted to fifty cents.

A dollar was thirty crowns? Two drinks for a dollar? “Yes, of course,” said Vladimir Girshkin, the all-knowing international businessman. “Allow me to treat you,” he added magnanimously. And he took it further, thinking: at an allowance of two thousand dollars a week, he could budget four thousand drinks for himself. Of course, he couldn’t get too greedy, he would have to buy a lot of people a lot of booze, and then there were taxis and dinners and whatnot, but still, five hundred drinks a week was not such an unreasonable figure.

A waiter, his face as droopy as a dachshund’s, wearing the familiar oversized purple jacket and a Prussian mustache, dragged himself over to their table.
“Dobry den’,”
he said. It was the same greeting as in Russian, Vladimir noted cheerfully. But then Kostya said a mouthful of words that only vaguely resembled the Russian version of “Can we have two cognacs, please.”

They drank. A group of Italian schoolgirls marched down the street, waving some sort of crowing-rooster puppets at them. A pair of the bronze nymphs took their time passing by Kostya and Vladimir’s table, looking at each of them in turn with their great round eyes two shades darker than the cognac. The embarrassed
Russians quickly turned away to face each other, then snuck furtive glances as the Italian girls rounded the corner. “So you said you had a relationship with an extraordinary American woman in New York,” Kostya said, his voice atremble.

“Several women,” Vladimir said nonchalantly. “But one was better than the others, as I suppose is always the case.”

“True,” said Kostya. “It has always been my dream to go to New York and find the nicest woman there and to live with her in a big house on the outskirts of town.”

“It’s always best to live in the center,” Vladimir corrected him, “and the nicest woman is hardly the most interesting. It’s a question of balance, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Kostya said, “but for children it’s best to find someone nice, and to hell with the rest.”

“Children?” Vladimir said and laughed.

“Sure, I’ll be twenty-eight next spring,” Kostya said. “Look,” he bent his head forward and pulled at the gray hairs clumped together at the center of his crown. “Now, of course, I would like a woman who will go with me to the symphony and the museum, and, if she insists, to the ballet. And she should be well-read, too, and like children, of course. And be able to keep house, for I’d like a big house, as I’ve said. But this is not too much to expect from a beautiful American woman such as the one you described, I don’t think.”

Vladimir smiled politely. He raised two fingers to the passing waiter and pointed at their empty glasses. “So have you anyone in Petersburg?” he said.

“My mother. She’s all alone. My father’s dead. She’s dying slowly. Cirrhosis. Emphysema. Dementia. Her pension comes out to thirteen dollars a month. I send her half my paycheck, but I still worry. Maybe I should move her out here someday.” And here Kostya sighed the familiar sigh of Vladimir’s Russian clients at the
Emma Lazarus Society; the lung-emptying sigh that comes with a lead weight attached to the neck. The flaxen-haired gangster had gone quite soft on his mama.

“Do you ever think of going back to Russia?” Vladimir said, wishing instantly he could retract those words because the last thing he wanted was for Kostya to leave.

“Every day,” Kostya said. “But I could never find anything in Petersburg or Moscow that pays quite so much. The
mafiya
is certainly over there . . .” Kostya paused, as they both reflected upon that single, unmentionable word. “But it’s much more dangerous. Everyone’s ready to reach for their guns. Here, things are calmer, the Stolovans are better at keeping order.”

“Yes, the Groundhog certainly seems like a pleasant individual,” Vladimir said. “I doubt that there’s anyone bent on causing him harm. Or his associates.”

Kostya laughed, twisting his tie around his fingers like a little boy given his first clip-on. “Are you trying to ask me something?” he said. A second, uninvited round of cognacs had arrived. “Truthfully, there are some Bulgarians who aren’t terribly happy about how he’s cornered the high end of the strippers’ market, but these are just little grudges that can be solved with a few bottles of this . . .” He lifted his glass. “No need for the bullets.”

“None,” Vladimir said.

Kostya looked to his watch. “I must go to a meeting,” he said. “But we should do this regularly. Oh, and also, do you run?”

“Run?” Vladimir said. “Like to catch a bus?”

“No, to build physical endurance.”

“I don’t have any physical endurance,” Vladimir said.

“Well, it’s settled then. Next week we’ll go running. There’s a nice little trail in back of the compound.” They shook hands, and Kostya wrote down directions to the expatriate place on a napkin. It was called Eudora Welty’s. Then, true to form, the energetic
young man got up and ran down the street, rounding the corner in no time.

Vladimir yawned spectacularly, finished off his cognac, then waved the waiter over for the bill, which came out to a little over three dollars. It was time to meet the Gringos.

BY THE TIME
he found the subterranean Eudora’s, Vladimir was already lost in the vast gastronomical abyss between lunch and dinner. Six souls remained in the restaurant’s cavernous digs, which suggested the place was once something other than the Cajun expat emporium it had become—perhaps a torture chamber where Catholics and Hussites hanged each other by the nose hairs from the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Now the only sign of tortured religiosity was the one advertising seared monkfish on a bed of fennel.

A waitress came to meet Vladimir. She was young, nervous, American, with a short, grizzly haircut, and dressed in some kind of kilt. She had the bad manners to call Vladimir “hon,” as in “Have a seat, hon.” She was Southern, too.

Vladimir perused the menu and his compatriots in late dining. To his immediate left was a table of four women and a dozen empty beer bottles. The women were dressed for the seventy-degree weather in engineer boots, corduroys, and T-shirts of various gloomy hues: hospital dun, narcolepsy gray, the black of the void. They talked so softly that Vladimir was unable to catch a single word despite their proximity, and they all looked terribly familiar, as if they had gone to Vladimir’s Midwestern college. He felt the
urge to sneeze out the school’s name to see if he would get a response.

The remaining customer was a beautiful fellow: slender and pale, broad-shouldered and leonine with a bell-curve mane of heavy light-brown hair that was surely the sign of a healthy organism. If scholars of beautiful people could raise any objections to this gentleman it might be the slightly aquiline nose—what does the lion need of the eagle?—and also the awkward fuzz covering his chin that made it possible to imagine his physiognomy with either a real beard or no beard, but certainly not with this sad moss.

The fellow was scribbling away in a notepad, the requisite empty beers were lined up on the table, his cigarette was on autopilot, smoking away in the grooves of the ashtray, and now and again his gaze would travel the restaurant, casually brushing past the table populated by the opposite sex.

Vladimir ordered a dish of pit-barbecued pork and a mint julep. “And what’s the beer everyone’s drinking here?” he asked the waitress.

“Unesko,” she said and smiled. He had betrayed himself as a newcomer.

“Yes, one of those too.”

He rummaged his satchel for his thick, shaggy notebook, a holdover from college: a poem here, a stab at fiction there. He threw it down so that its spine would ring against the table, then did his best to seem impervious to the stares of the women’s table and the young Hemingway across the room. He took out his marble Parker, embossed with the logo of Mother’s corporation, and he smiled at it. Or rather, to it.