Russian Debutante's Handbook (52 page)

And finally a postscript: “I could have had them kill you.”

Kostya removed the last piece of fruit from his gym bag. He polished the apple with his hankie and carefully placed it on Vladimir’s stomach. “Eat it immediately,” he said. “This kind of apple quickly turns brown on the inside.” He must have seen in this a fitting analogy for himself, for he clasped his hands to his powerful stomach, as if shoring up his guts, and said, “My God, those animals! They will suffer tenfold for this when their time of reckoning
comes. And they will suffer eternally. Although it must be said, if one is to speak truthfully, that you have sinned against them as well, Vladimir. You have betrayed the trust of an old man. Of an invalid! And as for the Groundhog . . . he pays us handsomely, no? For all his pathologies, he is a kind man in his own right. And mostly he treats us like brothers.”

Vladimir moved a fraction so that the apple rolled off the side of the bed and sent Kostya scrambling. He wanted to be surrounded by friends, not by the man who had trained his body for eight months only to allow for its destruction within minutes. “Tell the Groundhog to forget it,” Vladimir said. “I will have nothing more to do with this organization. I am leaving the country. And you better get out of this business as well, before they nail you to the cross like your friend there.”

“Please don’t talk like that, Vladimir,” Kostya said, polishing the apple with renewed vigor. He looked very Western these days in his tattersall Brooks Brothers shirt and tan chinos, but his frightened eyes reminded Vladimir of an old, toothless peasant, the kind he had only seen in picture books of Russia. “Now is the time to renew faith, not deny it,” Kostya was saying. “And I wouldn’t think of leaving the country if I were you. The Groundhog will certainly not allow it. There’s a guard outside the room and the front and back entrances to the hospital are also guarded. I’ve seen it myself, Vladimir. They won’t let you go. Have an apricot, please . . .”

“I will call the American embassy!” Vladimir said. “I am still an American citizen. I know my rights.”

Kostya looked at him askance. “That will only create problems, don’t you think?” He said this a little too forcefully, without his usual pious restraint, leaving Vladimir, for the first time, in question of his allegiances. “Besides, there’s no phone in this room. Now, here, let me get the curtains. What an astoundingly beautiful day it is outside. If only you could go for a walk.”

“Please get out,” Vladimir said. “You and your fucking religion, and this fruit . . . What am I supposed to do with all this fruit?”

“Vladimir!” Kostya pressed the apple to his heart. “Say no more! God can only forgive so much! Cross yourself!”

“Jews don’t cross themselves,” Vladimir said. “We’re the ones that put Him up there in the first place, remember?” He single-handedly drew the rank bed sheets over his head, a painful maneuver that brought to fore the sum of his injuries. “Now get out!” he said from beneath his linen fortress.

A DAY PASSED
into night, then the situation was reversed.

A young Slovak nurse, her eyes and hair dark like a gypsy’s, came to administer painkillers every couple of hours or so; to return the favor, Vladimir let her eat Kostya’s fruit. This nurse was as sturdy as a sausage. She flipped Vladimir over without a sigh, mindful of his fractures, then pressed the needle deep into his rear, a pain Vladimir had come to enjoy as it signified the onset of sweet giddiness.

With an entire socialist pharmacopoeia coasting through his veins, Vladimir spent his days either laughing maniacally as he tried to build an airplane out of the institutional wax paper, or, when the effects of the drugs were at their nadir, dolefully mooing to a bedside picture of Morgan, whose four-hour daily visits were obviously not enough. The times in-between he spent chattering away to himself in both Russian and English, chronicling his childhood and the end of his childhood, often pretending there was a bevy of grandchildren, small and furry, surrounding his bedside. “And when I was your age, Sari, I lived with a dominatrix in a condemned Alphabet City flat. Later, she went with my best friend Baobab, but by this time I was already a mafioso in Prava. What a business!”

But soon enough, in a week, say, Vladimir’s grandchildren
became tall and beefy, their features lightened, the tips of their noses curled upward, and sweatshirts with the names of American sports teams suddenly appeared. Vladimir guessed at their lineage. He knew he was reaching some sort of a decision.

“It’ll be the perfect place to recover,” Morgan said. “You’ll see where I was brought up, the
real
America. And Cleveland’s so nice in the summer. And it doesn’t smell at all anymore—they’ve cleaned up the Cuyahoga River. And if you want, my father can give you a job. And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.” She lowered her voice: “By the way, Tomaš and I are almost finished with our work here. Just so you know . . .”

“Let me think about it,” Vladimir said, even as a whiff of hardy Midwestern air wormed its way through the shut windows.

And if we don’t like it there, we can move someplace else.

The next day an adventuresome Vladimir ate a dish of soggy dumplings along with a trace of gulash minus the paprika (for health reasons, according to his doctor). He was able to flip himself over for the nurse, who said several encouraging words in her language, then slapped his butt kindly.

The nurse brought in copies of the
Prava-dence,
and here Vladimir could not escape Cohen’s raging commentaries about anti-Semitism and racism in Mittel Europa, in response to which Cohen was speedily organizing a march to the Old Town Square under the banner
EXPATRIATES
,
LET YOUR DISGUST BE KNOWN
! Swastikas would be burned, folk music played, and the Mourner’s Kaddish recited by a visiting dignitary for “a certain fallen friend.”

“But I’m not dead,” Vladimir reminded him when Cohen arrived along with František.

“No, no,” Cohen mumbled. “Although . . .” He did not elaborate, but instead blotted at his red eyes with both palms, creasing the unshaven portion of his face below. “Let’s have a beer,” he said and took out a bottle, which, with a great deal of clumsiness and
running foam, he eventually uncapped and placed in Vladimir’s good hand.

The beer did not seem like a good idea to Vladimir, what with all the exotic drugs pumped into his posterior, but he took a few sips nonetheless. Over the course of the past nine months he had shared so many beers with Cohen that drinking this final one was akin to a memorial, and looking now at his haggard friend brimming once again with righteous energy, Vladimir was sad to think they might never see one another again. “Well, I hope your march goes as well as your work on
Cagliostro,
” Vladimir said. “You have a knack for these things, Perry. I’m glad you were my mentor.”

“I know, I know,” Cohen said, brushing it off, embarrassed.

“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to help me to my feet.”

They looped their arms under his shoulders, and with František’s considerable heft accounting for most of the propulsion, lifted him off the bed while he grunted and said “Ach!” On his feet, he was quickly impressed by his mobility. The feet were, with the exception of a few bruises, remarkably undamaged. His attackers had obviously been more concerned with juicier areas and most of the fractures were concentrated among his ribs, which made him feel as if his torso was a package bulging with broken glass. When he held his posture erect and did not breathe excessively, he could commute from the bed to the door easily, but any time his locomotion required a shift of the body or an extended inhalation, things got a little blurry and dark at the edges.

“I’m ready to leave,” Vladimir told them.

Cohen instantly voiced his intention of staying and fighting until every young man with a shaved head was tied up for nine hours and forced to sit through a screening of Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah,
but František merely shook his head (his eyes, too, now had a hard look and were ringed underneath) and said: “Perhaps you are not aware of the situation outside. The guard here and the two guards by the entrance.”

Vladimir turned to František and spread out his good hand, palm-upward, in the famous
“Nu?”
gesture.

“Nu?”
František said. “What can I do? You understand now what our adversaries are capable of.” Then he sighed tremendously. But as the sigh exhausted itself, his face took on the pleased, royal appearance of Son of Apparatchik II. “All right, I see something, yes . . . But perhaps we should wait until your physique improves.”

“No,” Vladimir said. “It has to be now. Tell me, František . . . How much money do I have?”

František shook his head sadly. “That fool Kostya has frozen your DeutscheBank account. As a preventative measure, I was told.”

“I thought as much,” Vladimir said. “So what’s left for me here? Nothing.”

It was clear that his two friends had never expected to hear those words from Vladimir Girshkin, for immediately they came together and put their arms around his body, as gently as two men without children can do.

“Wait!” Cohen said. “What do you mean ‘nothing’? There must be
something
we can do! We can press charges. We can alert the media. We can . . .”

“Your girlfriend,” František whispered into Vladimir’s unbandaged ear. “She says they’re going to blow up the Foot this Friday at three o’clock precisely. The explosion will serve as a decoy.” František allowed himself a slight squeeze of the fractured former King of Prava.

“Be prepared to run,” he said.

VLADIMIR HAD AN
interesting dream. In this dream he ate dinner with a normal American family that took up an enormous dining table over which hung three well-spaced chandeliers—that’s how big this normal family was.

During the meal in the dream they ate St. Peter’s fish, which was chosen for its low caloric content and not for any religious reasons. This was explained to Vladimir by a man named Gramps, who, quite normally, sat at the head of the table. Gramps had lived a long time and was knowledgeable about many topics, especially about great, big wars. He was also the only person at the table to have a face, although it wasn’t the kind of face that, by itself, could imprint itself on the collective memory of a nation, in the manner of Khrushchev or the Quaker Oats Man.

It was an old man’s beetle-browed, double-chinned, wine-reddened face, a face that had clearly seen more good than bad through the years, even when you factored in the great, big wars—
especially
when you factored in the great, big ones. Yes, Vladimir never thought he would enjoy hearing about duty and courage and biting the bullet so much. And he was very polite to Gramps: When the old guy spilled gravy over the sleeve of Vladimir’s cuffed white shirt, Vladimir made a very appropriate joke, which was not in the least offensive to anyone present and seemed to put Gramps at ease. The dream ended right after Gramps had been put at ease.

Vladimir woke up pleased with his pleasantness at dinner, his stomach still purring under the gentle weight of the imaginary goy-fish. Sunlight flooded the room while a playful wind knocked at the windows. His nurse was wheeling in the breakfast cart. She was very animated, constantly pointing out the window and evidently saying a lot of nice things about the day outside. “
Petak!”
she said. Friday!

Vladimir nodded and said
“Dobry den’ ”
to her, which besides being a form of greeting also happened to mean “good day” in Stolovan.

She took out his breakfast—a single boiled egg, a piece of rye bread, and black coffee. Then, without ceremony and still gesticulating about the bountiful weather, she took out of the tray’s bottom compartment a briefcase, which she placed next to Vladimir’s
good arm.
“Dobry den’,”
she cheered and, smiling like a dark, Indo-European angel, wheeled the breakfast tray out of Vladimir’s life.

At first Vladimir admired the briefcase itself. It was a handsome affair of taupe patent leather monogrammed with Vladimir’s initials. He even thought of Mother and wondered if the first letter of the monogram could be changed in her favor.

Inside, there was an amusement-park-for-the-adult set. The first item Vladimir noticed was, of course, the revolver. It was the only gun he had ever seen that was not attached to a cop or to one of Gusev’s men, and the idea that it was in his possession proved more hilarious than frightening.
Still-life of V. Girshkin with Sidearm.
The gun came with a diagrammed set of instructions, scribbled in hasty pencil: “Gun already loaded with six bullets. Release safety. Aim. Hold gun steady. Press trigger (but only after you have aimed directly at target).” Hey now, thought Vladimir. Accent or not, I am a child of America. I should know how to blow someone away instinctively.

Next to the pretty gun were stacks of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred to a stack, ten stacks in all; his U.S. passport; a plane ticket for that day’s 5:00
P
.
M
. nonstop to New York; and a brief note: “When the nurse knocks twice, the guard outside your room has been distracted. The Foot will explode two minutes later. Run for the nearest taxi (two blocks down is Prospekt Narodna, the closest thoroughfare). Your friend will be waiting for you at the airport. Do not waste time explaining yourself to the hospital staff—they have been taken care of.”

Vladimir clasped the briefcase shut and moved one foot off the bed, aiming for his tasseled loafer from Harrods.

Just then there were two knocks at the door.

. . .Out the door Vladimir went, galloping madly, good hand around his body, a body which seemed ready to fold up like an army cot at any minute. He was rounding corner after corner,
through miserable green corridors that seemed no more than an extension of his room, past innumerable older nurses with breakfast carts paying him no heed, all the while following the magic red sign bounded by an arrow and an exclamation point that surely must have meant EXIT!

Outside! into the Prava spring! a street curling away hopefully toward Prospekt Narodna, lined with ancient, bloated Fiat ambulances . . . A familiar BMW stood directly across the way from the hospital steps; two associates of the Groundhog’s, Shurik and Log, were being entertained by a trio of elephantine nurses, whose hair—three bales of loose blond straw—was lifted behind them by the wind, potentially obscuring Vladimir’s escape. It would seem the gang was clowning around with a hypodermic needle.