Russian Debutante's Handbook (26 page)

Ah, so we were back to Cohen’s grand theme again. Vladimir tried to put together a smile. He was feeling happy and pleased with himself after their lunch, but knew that his mood was malleable under the depressant weight of alcohol and didn’t want the tragic curve of history to put him in a state. “Why are they underneath the saints?” he asked out of obligation.

“They’re supporting them,” Cohen said. “They’re the support team.”

Vladimir didn’t want to press it further. It was some sort of medieval humor, but what did those stalwarts of Christendom know, with their earth flat and reason always falling off the edges? This was 1993, after all, and with the exception of the nascent slaughter in the Balkans, the African Horn, the ex-Soviet periphery, and of course the usual carnage in Afghanistan, Burma, Guatemala, the West Bank, Belfast, and Monrovia, the world was a sensible place.

“Now I’m going to take you to my favorite place in this city,” Cohen said. And then, without warning, the restless man broke into a power walk, so that momentarily they quit the Emanuel Bridge and gained the embankment. Navigating past the churches, the mansions, and the singular powder tower that had chosen to decamp on this side of the Tavlata, they ran into a cozy lane, which ascended the city’s heights alongside the castle. Here, squat merchant’s mansions were marked by mosaics of ancient occupations
and family quirks: three tiny violins, a goose fat from centuries of inertia, an unhappy-looking frog. Vladimir was on the lookout for a gherkin; perhaps his family had had a Prava past as well.

It was a struggle maintaining his pace up the hill. The pollution was deadly; life itself seemed to reek of coal. Cohen, however, was making good time, although now that his friend wasn’t seated, Vladimir noticed that he carried a heavier-than-average load at the bottom, and his thighs, too, had benefited from the city’s pork masterpieces.

Cohen ducked into a lane even more narrow than the last, which soon exhausted itself into what could no longer be termed a lane, rather a confluence of the pastel backsides of four buildings. He seated himself on one of a series of steps leading to a phantom doorway that had long become a wall, and told Vladimir that this particular skylit cubicle was the most special corner of Perry Cohen’s Personal Prava. This was where he came to write his columns and poems for one of the town’s English papers, the woefully misnamed
Prava-dence.

So this was Cohen’s special place? They had run up and down the four hills of Prava for this? While the rest of the city (minus the Foot) was an endless stretch of panoramic vistas, Cohen had chosen the tightest, most prosaic corner of Eastern Europe . . . Why, Vladimir’s
panelak
had more character. Wait a second. Vladimir took another look. He must learn to think like Cohen. This was the key. A century ago he had taught himself to think like Francesca and her urban-god friends. Now he must adapt once more. What makes this place special to Cohen? Look closely. Think like Cohen. He likes this place because . . .

Got it! It’s special because it’s not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it. Special and different. He was different for coming to Prava and now he had validated his difference once more by choosing this place. Vladimir was ready to proceed. “Perry, I want you to make me a writer,” he said.

Cohen was instantly on his feet again, towering over Vladimir with his hands raised expectantly, as if any moment now they were going to hug over some declaration, ruffle each other’s hair over a mutual understanding. “A writer or a poet?” he asked, his breathing now as rapid as that of an older, corpulent man.

Vladimir thought about it. Poetry would probably take less time per unit. Surely that was why Cohen had chosen it. “A poet.”

“Have you read much?”

“Well . . .” Vladimir entertained a poetic list that would have made Baobab proud: “Akhmatova, Wolcott, Milosz . . .”

No, no. Cohen didn’t want to hear about them.

“Brodsky? Simic?”

“Stop right there,” Cohen said. “See, like too many poets starting out, you’ve already read too much. Don’t look at me like that. It’s true. You’re overread. The whole point of coming to the Old World is to chuck the baggage of the new.”

“Oh,” Vladimir said.

“Reading has nothing to do with writing. The two are diametrically opposed, they cancel each other out. Look, I need to know, Vladimir, do you really want me to be your mentor? Because if you do, you should be aware that it will involve some risk-taking.”

“Art without risk is stasis,” Vladimir said. “I told you that I wanted to be a poet, so I shall place myself in your hands, Perry.”

“Thank you,” Cohen said. “That’s very kind of you to say. And very brave. May I . . . ?” They had the hug for which Cohen had been preparing, Vladimir hugging back with all his might, pleased that the day had already netted him two good friends (Kostya being the first). Indeed, caught in the fine-smelling Cohen’s embrace, Vladimir decided to put the Iowan Jew in the basement of his pyramid scheme’s pyramid, down where the dollars and Deutsche marks were to be stacked beneath the promissory notes.

“Perry,” he said. “It is obvious we will be friends. You’ve taken
me into your world, now I must reciprocate. As it happens to be, I am a fairly rich man and not without some influence. I wasn’t kidding when I said my company was developing talent.”

The next two cryptic lines had come to him during the
biznesmenski
lunch. He had had the good sense to jot them down inside his palm. “Talent, Perry, may be an ocean liner with only a few staterooms, but I can’t let people like you spend your life in steerage. Will you allow me to make you wealthy?”

Cohen was moving closer in preparation for another hug. My God, another one! So this was Cohen when he wasn’t sitting around Eudora’s, deriding
arrivistes
for having less than two pens and suckling off the maternal teat—Cohen the gentle literary lion, the sweet-tempered dawdler of Stolovaya. Vladimir was suddenly happy to have submitted to his mentoring. Was that all it took to turn Cohen into an affectionate sap? Had Vladimir just single-handedly validated the young man’s place here in a tight, banal corner of Prava? Did he just make a friend for life?

At this point, the writer nearly had his arms around him, but when it was clear that no hug was forthcoming (Vladimir had his limits, after all), Cohen patted his shoulder instead, and said: “All right then, my financial Sherpa. Let’s go downtown and I’ll introduce you to my crowd.”

THEY TOOK A
tram down the hill, so that the castle loomed above them once again. Now its palace facades were floodlit in artificial yellow while the cathedral extended its spires and crosses in a spectral green—two lovers that didn’t speak the same language.

Vladimir asked for a geography lesson as the tram rocked them back and forth on its journey across the Tavlata, heaving them into the neatly groomed old-timers who were entitled to their tram
seats by law and derived a great, silent pleasure from watching the two standing foreigners tumble to their knees.

Cohen, like Kostya, was glad to play tour guide. He pointed at the passing landmarks, his fingers leaving nicotine smudges on the tram windows. There, on the hill, to the left of the castle, where they just talked “the talk” as it would later be known, where the roofs were tiled red and where the most important embassies and wine bars were clustered, that was called Malenka Kvartalka. “The Lesser Quarter!” Vladimir said, pleasantly surprised whenever his birth language intersected with Stolovan. But why this demeaning name for such a magnificent neighborhood? Cohen had no answer to that.

And where they were going—the “sea of spires” as seen from the morning’s first descent into the city, that was the Old Town. And to the south of the Old Town, the part of the city where the spires thinned out a bit and the roofs glimmered with more restraint, and the giant galosh of the Foot lorded over the proceedings like a phantom rubber commissar, was the New Town—which wasn’t so new, Cohen explained, dating back merely to the fourteenth century or so. “So what’s in the New Town?” Vladimir asked.

“The Kmart,” Cohen whispered with mock reverence.

AFTER CROSSING INTO
the Old Town, they drank many coffees in the plush if worn interior of the Café Nouveau, which ran amok with all the excesses of its namesake period: gilded mirrors, seats and carpets smothered in red velvet, the indispensable nymph of white marble. It was a long evening of listening to the ramblings of the young American on the subject of present-day poetry and art, the total of which left Vladimir feeling fortunate that he himself had no literary proclivities, harbored no bone-headed artistic intentions, else his meandering life would truly come to a bad end.
After all, look where the delusional Cohen now found himself, and Cohen was a rich dandy, not some dismal Russian whose life chances were pretty lousy from the get-go.

AS VLADIMIR WAS
thinking these thoughts and nodding along to Cohen’s discourse, their environment began to improve. A Dixieland jazz ensemble (composed entirely of Stolovans) took to the stage, the joint began to swing, the pretty marble tables soon filled up with pretty boys and girls, and Cohen’s corner emerged as a popular destination.

Subsequently, it became hard for Vladimir to remember how many of America’s finest sons and daughters he met that particular night. Throughout the evening, he remembered being especially cold and aloof while lots of hands were given for him to shake as Cohen presented Vladimir Girshkin, international magnate, talent scout, and soon-to-be poet laureate.

Few knew what to make of him; Vladimir accepted this. And what did Vladimir make of them? Well, to start with, they were a fairly homogenous group—white middle Americans with a fashionable grudge, that was the lowest common denominator. Native-born folks who never had to struggle with the dilemmas of an alpha peasant or a beta immigrant because five generations down the road every affluent young American was entitled to the luxury of being second-rate. And here in fairyland Prava, bonded by the glue of their mediocrity, they stuck together as if they had all been born in the same Fairfax County pod, had all suckled the same baby-boomer she-wolf like so many Romuluses and Remuses. The rules were only different for obvious outsiders like Vladimir who had to perform some grand gesture—conduct the Bolshoi, write a novel, launch a pyramid scheme—to gain a modicum of acceptance.

He noted their clothes. Some were dressed in the flannels,
which, Vladimir had noticed, were spreading by way of Seattle during his last month in the States. But the glam-nerd look, Francesca’s most tangible gift to Vladimir, was in evidence as well. The shirts way too tight, the sweaters too fluffy, the glasses too horn-rimmed, the hair coiffed either with seventies’ extravagance or fifties’ restraint. But look how much younger than Vladimir these specimens were! Twenty-one, twenty-two, maximum. Some probably couldn’t get served in American bars. He was old enough to be their teaching assistant.

Nevertheless, he would persevere. Wisdom came with age. Already, Vladimir could see himself declared an elder statesman. Another way to look at it: Despite their relative youth, the nouveau-nerds were hobbled by their unremarkable suburban demographics, while Vladimir, as a former New Yorker, was a freak by nature. But he was not the only freak. Others who tried particularly hard to stand out included Plank, a thin and nervous man who carried a yapping bite-sized dog—some kind of cross between a Chihuahua and a mosquito—in a little homemade pouch that was wrapped with silver lace. Women passing by took turns telling him how cute his dog was, its grimy, sorry little head constantly peeking out from its mobile home like a furry earflap with two eyes. But Plank, true to the game, wouldn’t smile or acknowledge them beyond a nod, knowing how out-of-season such sentiments could be. Cohen told Vladimir that Plank bred these customized minidogs in his
panelak
for the old Stolovan ladies, but Plank did not warm to Vladimir, stating: “There’s not much money in it, you know.” Oof, was that an antibusinessman slur? Did he not realize that Vladimir’s true love was the muse?

Vladimir did better with Alexandra: tall, slender, dark-haired, with a round, full Mediterranean face and a small, intelligent curve of bosom. In fact, she was (dare Vladimir think it) not unlike Francesca except her face was too conventionally pretty with its
high cheekbones and long natural lashes stretching upward in two parabolas. With Fran you had to find the beauty and fall in love with the blemishes, while Alexandra’s ready-made good looks seemed the perfect physical match for Cohen. The way Cohen’s eyes were firmly fixed on the silhouette of her body, sheathed in nothing but a tight-fitting black turtleneck extending into matching hose (no glam-nerd threads for her, thank you), certainly confirmed as much on his part.

Before Vladimir could be formally introduced, Alexandra grabbed his head and pressed the furry thing into the soft, bare crux of her neck. “Hi, honey!” she said. “I’ve heard all about you!” She had? But how? Vladimir had only met Cohen three hours ago.

“Come! Come with me!” She draped her arm around his and was leading him toward a kind of Art Nouveau tapestry hanging from a velvet wall—long swirls of multicolored swan feathers encircling what seemed to be a stylized
Pietà.
Yes, dear old Art Nouveau, thought Vladimir. Thank heavens, Abstract Expressionism and Co. had slain that gaudy beast. “Look! Look at this!” Alexandra shouted in her throaty, smoky voice. “A Pstrucha!”

A what? Oh, who cares . . . She was heavenly. That collarbone. You could see it through the turtleneck. She was like a swan herself. Red lipstick, black turtleneck. A haiku right there.

“Are you familiar with Adolf Pstrucha? I’ve got Pstrucha on the mind. Look at my book bag. Look at it!” It was, indeed, crammed with a dozen or so colorful books on the P-fellow. “Now Pstrucha wasn’t really Stolovan. He belonged to Slovene Moderna. Are you familiar with Slovene art? Oh, my dear boy, we must take a trip to Ljubljana. You mustn’t deprive yourself any further. Anyway, our man Pstrucha was practically laughed out of Prava. It was such a reactionary place in the early 1900s, the shithole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But . . .”