Russian Debutante's Handbook (3 page)

Beneath the photo stood a simple nightstand on which perched a wide-blade fan, its metal chassis gleaming.

“I see introductions are in order,” Rybakov said, wheeling in a cart with a miniature samovar, a bottle of vodka, and plates filled with matjes herring and Riga sprats. “Fan, this is Vladimir. Vladimir, Fan.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Vladimir said to the Fan. “I’ve heard such wonderful things.”

The Fan said not a word.

“The Fan’s a little tired,” Mr. Rybakov said, stroking the blades with a velvet cloth. “We spent all last night drinking and singing hooligan songs. ‘Murka, oh, my Murka . . . Oh, my darling Murka . . . Hello my Murka and goodbye!’ Do you know that one?”

“You betrayed our romance . . .” Vladimir sang. “Oh, my darling Murka . . . And for that, my Murka, you will die!”

“What a beautiful voice you have,” Mr. Rybakov cheered. “Maybe we can form a little impromptu singing society. The Red Army Choir in Exile. What do you say, Fan?”

The Fan remained silent.

“Do you know that he’s my best friend?” Rybakov suddenly said of the Fan. “My son’s gone, Miss Harosset’s running around doing the Devil’s work, so who else is there for me? I remember when we first met. I had just landed at Kennedy Airport, my son was being held up in customs—the Interpol fellows wanted to have a little heart-to-heart with him . . . And then the women from the local Hebrew society came by to give money to the arriving Jews. Well, they took one look at my Christian mug and they gave me a salami instead, and some of that awful American cheese . . . And then—I guess it was because of the jungle heat that summer—the Hebrews took pity on me and gave me my Fan. He was so spontaneous. Right away, we started chatting like a pair of old shipmates! We haven’t been apart since that day.”

“I haven’t made many friends in this country either,” Vladimir mused quietly. “It’s hard for us Russians to make friends here. Sometimes I get so lonely—”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Rybakov interrupted, “Very nice, Vladimir, but the day is short, so let us forget our sadness and talk like men.” He cleared his throat, then continued magisterially.

“
VLADIMIR
,
THE FAN
wishes to relate to you story. A
secret
story.”

“Do you like secrets, Volodya?”

“Well, to be truthful—” Vladimir said.

“Sure, everyone likes secrets. Now, our secret story begins with a father and son, both born and raised in the great port city of Odessa. You see, Volodya, a closer father and son there could never be, even though this father, a sailor by profession, was often sailing around the world and had to leave the son in the care of his many lovers. Arrr,” Mr. Rybakov growled with evident pleasure. He settled into a nearby recliner and adjusted the pillows.

“Each long separation weighed on the father’s heart,” he said, closing his eyes. “At sea, he would often conduct imaginary conversations with his son, even if the cook, Akhmetin, that lousy Chechen, would make fun of him mercilessly and undoubtedly would spit in his soup. But then, one day in the late 1980s . . . guess what happened? Socialism started to collapse! And so, without further thought, the father and son immigrated to Brooklyn.

“Horrible circumstances,” Rybakov complained. “A studio apartment. Spanish people everywhere. Oh, the plight of the poor!
Now, the son, Tolya was his name but everyone called him the Groundhog (that’s a funny story too, how he got that name) . . . Anyway, the son was happy to be reunited with his
papatchka,
but he was still a young man. He wanted to bring a girl over, to screw her thoroughly from top to bottom. It wasn’t easy on him, believe me. And there was no work around that really took advantage of his natural intelligence. Maybe a few Greeks hired him to blow up their diners for insurance purposes. He was proficient in these matters, so boom boom—” Rybakov took a big slurp of vodka. “Boom boom. He made ten, twenty thousand like that, but still the son was restless. He was a genius, see?” The Fan Man pointed to his head for clarification.

Vladimir touched his own head in agreement. The combination of tea and vodka was making him sweat. He fumbled in his pocket for a tissue, but found only the ten hundred-dollar bills Rybakov had given him. The bills felt crisp, almost starched; for some reason, Vladimir wanted to put them inside his underwear, feel them cosset his privates. “And then the son got a special tip,” Mr. Rybakov went on. “He made a connection. He went first to London, then to Cyprus, then to Prava.”

Prava? Vladimir perked up. The Paris of the 90s? The stomping ground of America’s artistic elite? The SoHo of Eastern Europe?

“Oh, yes,” the Fan Man continued, as if he had sensed Vladimir’s disbelief. “Eastern Europe. That’s where you make the money these days. And sure enough, in a couple of years the son takes over Prava, the cowed natives bending to his will. He runs the taxi racket at the airport, arms contraband from Ukraine to Iran, caviar from the Caspian Sea to Brighton Beach, opium from Afghanistan to the Bronx, prostitutes in the main square, right outside the Kmart. And he sends his lucky father money every week. Now that’s a thankful son. Could’ve put Papa in a nursing home or a psycho farm, which is what children do in these cynical times.”

Mr. Rybakov opened his eyes and turned to Vladimir, who was nervously fingering his balding temples.

“So,” Rybakov said, “now that the Fan is silent, there’s time for us to think the story over. How do we feel about this interesting tale? Are we outraged, in a kind of American way, about the activities of the son? Are we worried about the prostitution and the contraband and the diners blowing up—”

“Well,” Vladimir said. “The story does raise some issues.” The Rule of Law, that bedrock of Western democracy—that was one issue. “But we do have to remember,” Vladimir said, “that we are poor Russians, that we live in difficult times for our homeland, and that we often have to take special measures to feed our families, to survive.”

“Yes! An excellent answer!” said the Fan Man. “You’re still a
russki muzhik,
not like some of these assimilationist children with their law degrees. The Fan is pleased. Now, Vladimir, I must make a clean breast of it—I baited you up here for more than just herring and vodka and the reminiscences of a tired old man.

“This morning, the Fan and I had a conference call with my son, the Groundhog, in Prava. He, too, is a big fan of your mother. He knows that the son of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin will not disappoint us. Oh, Vladimir, stop with your modesty! I won’t hear of it! ‘I’m not my mama’s son!’ he cries. ‘I’m a simple man!’ You’re a little cucumber, that’s what you are . . .

“Well, cucumber, the Fan and I are pleased to offer you the following proposition: Get me my citizenship, and my son will make you an associate director in his organization. The minute I’m naturalized you’ll have a first-class ticket to Prava. He’ll turn you into a schemer of the first rank. A modern businessman. A . . . how do you Jews say it . . . ? A
gonif.
Job pays more than eight dollars an hour, that’s for certain. Requires knowledge of English and Russian. Candidate should be Soviet and American all at once. Interested?”

Vladimir crossed his legs and brought himself forward; he hugged himself in this position and shuddered a little. But all this physical melodrama was ridiculous. From a logistical standpoint, there was simply nothing there. He was not going to become a mafioso in Eastern Europe. He was the coddled single child of Westchester parents who had once paid twenty-five thousand dollars a year to send him to a progressive Midwestern college. True, Vladimir was not known to traverse a well-defined moral landscape, but trafficking arms to Iran was definitely off his map.

And yet, in the very back of his mind, a window opened and Mother leaned out shouting for all to hear: “Soon my Little Failure will be a Big Success!”

Vladimir shut that window with a bang. “There’s really no need for this, Mr. Rybakov,” he said. “I will refer your case to my agency’s lawyer. He will help you fill out the Freedom of Information Act form. We will find out why your citizenship application was denied.”

“Yes, yes. My son and the Fan are of a like mind on this issue as well: You are a Jew, and a Jew isn’t stupid; you have to give him something to make it worth his while. I’m sure you’re familiar with the old Russian proverb: If there’s no water in the sink, then the Yids have had their drink . . .”

“But Mr. Rybakov—”

“Now, listen to me, Girshkin! Citizenship is everything! A man who doesn’t belong to a country is not a man. He is a tramp. And I am too old to be a tramp.” There was a moment of silence save for the smacking sounds the old sailor made with his fleshy lips. “Would you be so kind,” he whispered, “as to set the Fan to high. He wants to sing a song in celebration of our new understanding.”

“Just press the
HIGH
button?” Vladimir asked, his stomach sounding the requisite music of nervousness.
What new
understanding?
“My mother says first you must set a fan to medium and then after a while set it to high, because otherwise the motor—”

Mr. Rybakov raised his hand to cut him off. “Service the Fan as you will,” he said. “You’re a good young man and I trust you with him.”

Vladimir felt the heaviness of the word “trust” in Russian, a favorite in the Girshkin household. He rose without ceremony and went over to the fan, pressing the button marked
MEDIUM
. The apartment was centrally air-conditioned but the new breeze, a fist of cool air punching through the general coldness, was welcome. He hit the button marked
HIGH
and the blades visibly doubled their effort, their buzz now punctuated by internal creaks and pops.

“I ought to grease him again,” whispered Rybakov. “You can hardly hear him with all that creaking.”

Vladimir stumbled for a response, but came out with a sort of mooing sound.

“Shh, listen,” said his host. “Listen to the song. Do you know this song?” The Fan Man let out a series of raspy creaks himself, and then Vladimir realized that he was singing along:

“Ta-pa-pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.

“Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra-pa-ra-ra

“I won’t forget you

“Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.”

“Yes, I know that song!” Vladimir said. “Ta-pa-pa-ra-ra Moscow nights . . .”

They sang the verse several times, occasionally substituting remembered words for the “pa-ra-ra.” Perhaps it was his imagination, but Vladimir could hear the fan keeping tempo with them, if not actually prodding them into the bittersweet ditty.

“Give me your hand,” said Mr. Rybakov, opening a creased, vein-ridden palm on the table. “Just put your hand there,” he said.

Vladimir looked at his own hand carefully as if he was about to place it inside the fan’s grating. Such slender fingers . . . They said slender fingers would be good for piano, but you had to start early for that. Mozart was—

He placed his hand into the warmth of the Fan Man’s palm and felt it close around him like a python over a rabbit. “The Fan is spinning,” said Mr. Rybakov and squeezed hard.

Vladimir looked at the spinning fan and thought of his parents and their upcoming weekend barbecue. “Pa-ra-ra-ra-ra Moscow nights.” They sang it in Brighton Beach and they sang it in Rego Park, and they sang it on WEVD, New York—“We Speak Your Language”—that the Girshkins had always left the radio tuned to, even when his first American friends from Hebrew school came over to play computer games and they heard the “Pa-ra-ra-ra . . .” and the two-dollar synthesizer orchestra in the background, and saw his parents at the kitchen table singing along while munching on the verboten pork cutlets, slurping down the mushroom-and-barley soup.

Mr. Rybakov released Vladimir’s hand and patted it casually, as one pets a favored dog after it returns with the morning papers. He slumped over the side of his recliner. “Be so kind as to get the bedpan from my bedroom,” he said.

SEVERAL HERRINGS LATER
, Vladimir bid his client farewell and returned to his humble Alphabet City lodgings. He was due to celebrate his birthday with “little Challah-bread,” his lover. But as fate had provided, on this particular day Challah was summoned to the Dungeon, the Chelsea whipping cavern. Four Swiss bankers, recent transplants to New York, had found that in addition to their jobs restructuring Third World debt, they had in common the need to be humiliated by a mother figure, someone a little more substantial than the Dungeon’s standard fare. And so Challah’s beeper had registered the code $$URGENT$$. Off she went with a little metal box full of dick rings and nipple clamps, to be back by nine, she promised, which left Vladimir with some time alone.

First he took a long cold shower. It was ninety degrees outside that day; inside, a good hundred. Then, naked and washed, he happily roamed around the two-and-a-half rooms of their railroad flat, traversing the narrow path where his urbane belongings and Challah’s junk had once gone to war, and were now separated by an unofficial Green Line.

This was already Vladimir’s third year of living apart from his
parents but the exhilaration of having escaped their tender clutches simply would not cease. He was acquiring a homeowner’s mentality. He dreamed of someday cleaning house, of turning the gap between the kitchen and the bedroom, which was now referred to as the “living room” into a personal study.

And what would Vladimir study in his study? Vladimir was partial to short fiction—brief, thoughtful stories where people suffered quickly and acutely. For instance, the Chekhov story where the horse-cab driver tells all his fares that his son has died the other day and nobody cares. Terrible. Vladimir had first read that one in Leningrad, lying as he always did in his sick bed, while Mother and Grandmother fussed in the next room, concocting bizarre Russian folk cures for his bronchial illnesses.

The driver story (“Heartache” its simple name) was shorthand for the young Vladimir’s melancholy existence, the growing sense of the bed as his true home. A home away from the sepulchral Leningrad cold, where once he had played hide-and-seek with his father beneath the giant bronze feet of the Lenin statue, its sooty outstretched arm pointing ever upward to the brilliant future. Away from the primary school, where the few times he was deemed well enough to strap on his bright, creaseless uniform and make an appearance, children and teacher alike stared at him as if he was a cosmonaut stricken with the Andromeda Strain, erroneously released from quarantine. And away from Seryozha Klimov, the overfed hooligan—his parents had already given him a crash course in the social sciences—who would come up to him during recess, and gleefully yell, “Jew, Jew, Jew . . .”