The Russian Debutante's Handbook

1. THE STORY OF VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN

THE STORY OF Vladimir Girshkin—part P. T. Barnum, part V. I. Lenin, the man who would conquer half of Europe (albeit the wrong half)—begins the way so many other things begin. On a Monday morning. In an office. With the first cup of instant coffee gurgling to life in the common lounge.

His story begins in New York, on the corner of Broadway and Battery Place, the most disheveled, godforsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York’s financial district. On the tenth floor, the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society greeted its clients with the familiar yellow water-stained walls and dying hydrangeas of a sad Third World government office. In the reception room, under the gentle but insistent prodding of trained Assimilation Facilitators, Turks and Kurds called a truce, Tutsis queued patiently behind Hutus, Serbs chatted up Croats by the demilitarized water fountain.

Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin—the immigrant’s immigrant, the expatriate’s expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times—was going at it with the morning’s first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

VLADIMIR WAS TWENTY-FIVE today. He had lived in Russia for twelve years, and then there were the thirteen years spent here. That was his life—it added up. And now it was falling apart.

This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir’s best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir’s first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if a cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir’s unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships.

Yes, sex night with Challah. Challah with the bulging cheeks and determined radish of a nose, looking ever matronly and suburban, despite all the torn black shirts, gothic bracelets, and crucifixes that downtown Manhattan’s goofiest shops managed to sell to her. Sex night—an offer Vladimir dared not refuse, given the prospect of waking up in a bed entirely empty; well, empty save for lonely Vladimir. How did that work again? You open your eyes, turn, and stare into the face of… the alarm clock. A busy and unforgiving face that, unlike a lover’s, will say only “tick tock.”

Suddenly, Vladimir heard the frenzied croaking of an elderly Russian out in the reception room: “Opa! Opa! Tovarisch Girshkin! Ai! Ai! Ai!”

The problem clients. They would come first thing Monday morning, having spent the weekend rehearsing their problems with their loathsome friends, practicing angry postures in front of the bathroom mirrors of their Brighton Beach studios.

It was time to act. Vladimir braced himself against the desk and stood up. All alone in the back office, with no point of reference other than the kindergarten-sized chairs and desks that comprised the furniture, he suddenly felt himself remarkably tall. A twenty-five-year-old man in an oxford shirt gone yellow under the armpits, frayed slacks with the cuffs coming comically undone, and wing tips that bore the black traces of a house fire, he dwarfed his surroundings like the lone skyscraper they built in Queens, right across the East River. But it wasn’t true: Vladimir was short.

In the reception room, Vladimir found the bantam security guard from Lima pinioned against the wall. A chunky old Russian gent sporting the traditional flea market attire and six-dollar crew cut had trapped the poor fellow with his crutches and was now slowly leaning in on his prey, trying to bite him with his silver teeth. Alas, at the first hint of internecine violence, the native-born Assimilation Facilitators had ignobly fled the scene, leaving behind their Harlem, U.S.A., coffee mugs and Brooklyn Museum tote bags. Only junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin remained to assimilate the masses. “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” he shouted to the Russian. “We never do that to the guard.”

The madman turned to face him. “Girshkin!” he sputtered. “It’s you!” He pushed himself away from the guard in one remarkable motion and started limping toward Vladimir. He was a man of small stature, made smaller by a weighty green rucksack bearing down on him. One side of his azure guayabera shirt was filled bosom to navel with Soviet war medals, and their weight pulled down one collar, exposing a veined lump of neck.

“What do you want from me?” Vladimir said.

“What do I want from you?” the Russian shouted. “My God, what haughtiness!” A shaking crutch was quickly lifted into place between them. The lunatic executed a practice jab: On guard!

“I spoke to you on the phone last month,” the crutch-bearer complained. “You sounded very cultured on the phone, remember?”

Cultured, yes. That would be him. Vladimir examined the man who was killing his morning. He had a broad Slavic (as opposed to Jewish) face, with a web of creases so deep they could have been carved with a pocketknife. Bushy Brezhnevian eyebrows were overtaking his forehead. A small island of hair, still blond, was moored at the geographical center of his pate. “We spoke, heh?” Vladimir said, in the devil-may-care tone of Soviet officialdom. He was a big fan of the syllable “heh.”

“Oh, yes!” the old man enthused.

“And what did I say to you, heh?”

“You said to come over. Miss Harosset said to come over. The fan said to come over. So I took the number five train to Bowling Green like you said.” He looked pleased with himself.

Vladimir took a tentative step back toward his office. The guard was settling back on his perch, rebuttoning his shirt, and mumbling something in his language. Still, something was amiss. Let’s tally up: angry Slav; cowering security guard; low-paying, absurdist job; misspent youth; sex night with Challah. Oh, yes. “What’s this fan?” Vladimir asked.

“It’s the one in my bedroom,” the fellow said, smirking at a question so obvious. “I have two fans.”

“The fan said to come over,” Vladimir said. And he has two fans. Right then, on the spot, Vladimir recognized that this wasn’t a problem client. This was a fun client. A loop-de-loop client. The kind of client that turned on your morning switch and kept you brisk and agitated all day. “Listen,” Vladimir said to this Fan Man, “Why don’t we step into my office and you tell me everything.”

“Bravo, young one!” The Fan Man gave a victory salute to his erstwhile victim the security guard. He limped into the back office, where he lowered himself onto one of the cold plastic chairs. Painfully, he removed the green beast of a rucksack.

“So, what’s your name? We’ll start with that.”

“Rybakov,” said the Fan Man. “Aleksander. Or just Aleks.”

“Please… Tell me about yourself. If you’re comfortable—”

“I’m psychotic,” Rybakov said. His enormous eyebrows twitched in confirmation, and he smiled with false modesty, like a kid who brings in his father the astronaut on career day.

“Psychotic!” Vladimir said. He tried to look encouraging. It was not uncommon for the mad Russians to give him their diagnosis right off the bat; some treated it almost like a profession or a calling in life. “And you’ve been diagnosed?”

“By many people. I’m under observation as we speak,” said Mr. Rybakov, peering under Vladimir’s desk. “Look, I even wrote a letter to the president in the New York Times.”

He produced a crumpled piece of paper reeking of alcohol, tea, and his own wet palm. “Dear Mr. President,” read Vladimir. “I am a retired Russian sailor, a proud combatant against the Nazi terror in the Second World War and a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. I have lived in your wonderful country for more than five years and have received much moral and financial support from the warm and highly sexed American people (in particular, my thoughts alight on the women skating around Central Park with just a bit of cloth wrapped around their breasts). Back in Russia, senior citizens with mental disabilities are kept in dilapidated hospitals and humiliated on a daily basis by young hooligans who have scarcely heard of the Great Patriotic War and have no sympathy for their elders who fought tooth and nail to keep out the murderous Krauts. In America, I am able to lead a full, satisfactory life. I select and purchase groceries at the Sloan’s supermarket on Eighty-ninth Street and Lexington. I watch television, specifically the show about the comical black midget on channel five. And I help defend America by investing part of my social security income into companies such as Martin Marietta and United Technologies. Soon I will become a citizen of this great nation and will be able to choose my leaders (not like in Russia). So I wish you, Mr. President, and your desirable American wife and developing young daughter, a very healthy, happy New Year. Respectfully, Aleksander Rybakov.”

“Your English is impeccable.”

“Oh, I can’t take credit for that,” the Fan Man said. “That was Miss Harosset’s translation. She was faithful to the original, you can believe me. She wanted to put ‘German’ instead of ‘Kraut,’ but I insisted. You have to write what you feel inside, I told her.”

“And the New York Times actually published this letter?” Vladimir asked.

“Those cretinous editors crossed out half my words,” Mr. Rybakov said, shaking a symbolic pen at Vladimir. “It’s American censorship, my friend. You don’t blot out the words of a poet! Well, I’ve instructed Miss Harosset to commence a lawsuit on this matter as well. Her little sister is thrashing around with an important state prosecutor, so I think we’re in good hands.”

Miss Harosset. That must be his social worker. Vladimir looked down at the blank form on which he should have been jotting down information. A rich and particular psychosis was taking shape before him, threatening to upset the meager line allotted for “client’s mental state.” He grew restless, attributing it to the coffee settling within his abdomen, and started tapping out “The Internationale” on his metal desk, a nervous habit inherited from his father. Outside the nonexistent windows of the back office, the canyons of the financial district were awash with rationalism and dull commercial hope: suburban secretaries explored bargains on cosmetics and hose; Ivy Leaguers swallowed entire pieces of yellowtail in one satisfied gulp. But here it was just Vladimir the twenty-five-year-old and the poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Vladimir looked up from his thoughts—his client was wheezing and sputtering like an overtaxed radiator. “Look, Rybakov,” he said. “You are a model immigrant. You collect Social Security. You publish in the Times. What can I possibly do for you?”

“The crooks!” Rybakov shouted, grabbing once again for his crutch. “The awful crooks! They won’t give me my citizenship! They’ve read the letter in the Times. And they know about the fan. They know about both fans. You know how some summer nights the blades get a little rusty and you have to grease them with corn oil? So they’ve heard the trikka trikka and the krik krak, and they’re scared! An old invalid, they’re scared of! There are cowards in every country, even in New York.”

“That’s true enough,” Vladimir agreed. “But I think what you need, Mr. Rybakov, is an immigration lawyer… For unfortunately, I am not…”

“Oh, I know who you are, little goose,” Mr. Rybakov said.

“Pardon?” Vladimir said. The last time he had been called “little goose” was twenty years ago, when he was, indeed, a diminutive, unsteady creature, his head covered with a smattering of golden down.

“The Fan sang an epic song for me the other night,” said Rybakov. “It was called ‘The Tale of Vladimir Girshkin and Yelena Petrovna, His Mama.’”

“Mother,” Vladimir whispered. He didn’t know what else to say. That word, when spoken in the company of Russian men, was sacred in itself. “You know my mother?”

“We haven’t had the pleasure of being formally introduced,” Rybakov said. “But I read about her in the business section of the New Russian Word. What a Jewess! The pride of your people. A capitalist she-wolf. Scourge of the hedge funds. Ruthless czarina. Oh, my dear, dear Yelena Petrovna. And here I am chatting with her son! Surely he knows the right people, fellow Hebrews perhaps, among the dastardly agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

Vladimir scrunched up his hairy upper lip so as to smell its animal fragrance—a soothing pastime. “But you’re mistaken,” he said. “There is nothing I can do for you. I lack Mother’s cunning, I have no friends in the INS… I have no friends anywhere. The apple has fallen far from the apple tree, as they say. Mother may be a she-wolf, but look at me…” Vladimir gestured expansively at the deprivation around him.

Just then the double doors opened, and, twenty minutes late for work, the Chinese and Haitian women—Vladimir’s fellow junior clerks in the back office—walked in from the streets, laden with buttered rolls and coffee. They retreated behind the desks labeled CHINA and HAITI, tucking in their long, gauzy summer skirts. When Vladimir’s gaze returned to his client, ten hundred-dollar bills, ten portraits of purse-lipped Benjamin Franklin, were unfurled on the table to form a paper fan.

“Ai!” Vladimir cried. Instinctively, he grabbed the hard currency and deposited it inside his shirt pocket. He glanced at his international colleagues. Oblivious of the crime just committed, they were stuffing themselves with morning rolls, bantering about recipes for Haitian crackers and how to know if a man was decent. “Mr. Rybakov!” Vladimir whispered. “What are you doing? You cannot give me money. This is not Russia!”

“Everywhere is Russia,” said Mr. Rybakov philosophically. “Everywhere you go… Russia.”

“Now I want you to place your upturned palm on the table,” Vladimir instructed. “I will quickly throw the money in there, you put the money in your wallet, and we shall consider this matter closed.”

“I would prefer not to,” said Aleksander Rybakov, the Soviet Bartleby. “Look,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Come on over to my house. We’ll talk. The Fan likes his tea early on Mondays. Oh, and we’ll have Jack Daniel’s, and beluga, and luscious sturgeon, too. I live on Eighty-seventh Street, right next to the Guggenheim Museum, that eyesore. But it’s a nice penthouse, views of the park, a Sub-Zero refrigerator… A lot more civilized than this place, you’ll see… Forget about your duties here. Helping Equadorians move to America, it’s a pointless task. Come, let’s be friends!”

“You live on the Upper East Side…?” Vladimir babbled. “A penthouse? On Social Security? But how can it be?” He had the dizzy impression that the room had begun to sway. The only enjoyment Vladimir derived from his job was encountering foreigners even more flummoxed by American society than he was. But today this simple pleasure was proving highly elusive. “Where did you get the money?” Vladimir demanded of his client. “Who bought you this zero refrigerator?”

The Fan Man reached over and pinched Vladimir’s nose between thumb and forefinger, a familiar Russian gesture reserved for small children. “I’m psychotic,” the Fan Man explained. “But I’m no idiot.”

2. YELENA PETROVNA, HIS MOTHER

ON THIS MONDAY morning, like all Monday mornings, the Emma Lazarus Society experienced a state of misdirected frenzy. Lonely social workers were opening up their hearts to one another; the agency’s Acculturation Czar, a homesick, suicidal Pole, was bellowing through his introductory course on America (“Selfish People, Selfish Land”); and the weekly immigrants’ pet show was underway in the International Lounge, a Bengali turtle leading the pack this time.

Surrounded by such polyglot commotion, it was easy for Vladimir to abandon his post—the so-called Russia Desk, covered with bureaucratic ink stains and newspaper clippings about Soviet Jews in distress. But before Vladimir could accompany Mr. Rybakov to his penthouse, an impassioned well-wisher rang him at the office.

“DEAREST VOLODECHKA!” Mother shouted. “Happy birthday…! Happy new beginning…! Your father and I wish you a brilliant future…! Much success…! You’re a talented young man…! The economy’s improving…! We gave you all our love as a child…! Everything we had, to the very last…!”

Vladimir turned down the volume on the headset. He knew what was coming, and, indeed, seven exclamation marks down the road, Mother broke down and started wailing God’s name in the possessive: “Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi!”

“Why did I get you that job, Vladimir?” she cried. “What was I thinking? You promised me you would stay no more than one summer—it’s been four years! I’ve stagnated my own son, my one and only. Oh, how did this transpire? We brought you to this country, and for what? Even the stupid native-born do better than you…”

On and on she went, through a barrage of tears, gurgling and explosive nasal contretemps, about the joys of going to college and then law school, the lack of status in being a desk slave for a nonprofit agency, working for eight dollars an hour while his contemporaries were going full steam ahead with their professional educations. Gradually, her soft, steady wail increased in tempo and pitch, until she reminded Vladimir of a devout woman at a Middle Eastern funeral the moment her son’s coffin is lowered into the ground.

Vladimir sat back and sighed loudly in protest. She couldn’t stop, not even on his birthday.

It had taken his own father a year of courtship and a decade of marriage to adapt to Mother’s talent of bawling at will. “Don’t cry. Oh, why are you crying, little porcupine?” the young Dr. Girshkin would whisper to his wife in their dim Leningrad apartment as he ran his hands through her hair, hair darker than the exhaust hanging over the city, hair which even strong Western hair-curlers could not curl (they called her Mongolka, and she was, indeed, one-eighth Mongolian). Intermittent flashes of neon would illuminate the tears descending her oblong face as the meat-store sign positioned directly below their flat struggled to keep alight in the erratic power grid. He would never forgive her for not responding to his caresses until late into the night, when she fell asleep and instinctively curled into his shoulder, long after somebody had mercifully put out the MEAT sign and the streets surrendered to the foggy and indiscernible Petersburg darkness.

Vladimir, as well, suffered under his mother’s accusative wails as B-plus report cards were ceremonially burned in the fireplace; as china was sent flying for chess-club prizes not won; as he once caught her in her study sobbing at three in the morning, cradling a photo of the three-year-old Vladimir playing with a toy abacus, so bright-eyed, so enterprising, so full of hope…But the coup de grace took place during the wedding of a California Girshkin when Mother publicly broke down and accused Vladimir—shyly disco-dancing with a fat cousin—of having “the hips of a homosexual.” Oh, those sensuous hips!

Guilt-ridden and confused, Vladimir looked to his father for reinforcement, or at least an explanation, but one was not forthcoming until his early teens, when his father took him on a long autumn walk through swampy, gaseous Alley Pond Park—Queens’ gift to the nation’s forests—allowing his mouth to expel the word “divorce” for the first of many times.

“Your mother suffers from a kind of madness,” he had said. “In a very real and medical way.”

And Vladimir, young and tiny but already a child of America, said, “Aren’t there pills she can take?” But the holistic-minded Dr. Girshkin did not believe in pills. A strenuous alcohol rubdown and a hot banya were his universal prescriptions.

Even now, when Vladimir felt more detached from her sobs than ever, he remained at a loss for what to say in order to bring them to an end. His father had never figured it out either. Nor did he ever gather the courage to go through with his meticulously planned divorce. Mother was, for all her faults, his sole friend and confidante in the New World.

“Bozhe moi, Vladimir,” wept Vladimir’s mother, and then she stopped abruptly. She did something with the phone: it beeped. For a moment there was nothing. “I’m putting you on hold, Vladimir,” she said finally. “There’s a call from Singapore. It could be important.”

An instrumental version of “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” blared from the electronic bowels of Mother’s corporation and into Vladimir’s ear.

It was time to go. Mr. Rybakov, left unattended, had stumbled back into the reception room and was terrorizing the security guard once more. Vladimir was close to hanging up when Mother returned with a whimper. Vladimir cut her off: “So how are things with you?”

“Terrible,” said Mother, switching to English, which meant job-talk. She blew her nose. “I have to fire someone in office.”

“Good for you,” Vladimir said.

“Is big complication,” groaned Mother. “He is American African. I am nervous I will say something wrong. My English not so good. You must teach me to be sensitive to Africans this weekend. It is important skill, no?”

“I’m coming over this weekend?” said Vladimir.

His mother made an effort to laugh and told him how insane it would be not to have a birthday barbecue. “You’re only twenty-five once,” she said. “And you are not a—How you say? A complete loss.”

“I’m not on crack, for one thing,” Vladimir volunteered cheerfully.

“And you’re not homo,” said his mother. “Hmm?”

“Why do you always—”

“Still with Jewish girl. Little Challah-bread.”

“Yes,” Vladimir reassured her. Yes, yes, yes.

Mother exhaled deeply. “Well, that’s good,” she said. She told him to bring his swimming trunks on Saturday because the pool might be fixed by then. She managed to both sigh and kiss Vladimir good-bye at the same time. “Be strong,” was her last, enigmatic bit of advice.

THE LOBBY OF Mr. Rybakov’s building, the Dorchester Towers, was centered around a tapestry depicting the Dorchester coat of arms, a double-headed eagle clutching a scroll in one beak and a dagger in the other—the graphic story of New Money and how it got that way. Two doormen opened the door for Vladimir and his client. A third one gave Vladimir a piece of candy.

Displays of wealth, American-style, always made Vladimir feel as if Mother was behind him, whispering into his ear her favorite bilingual nickname for him: Failurchka. Little Failure. Woozy with spite, he leaned against an elevator wall, trying to ignore the rich red glow of Burmese Padauk wood, praying that Rybakov’s apartment would be one hovel of a penthouse, government-subsidized and littered with crap.

But the elevator doors opened to reveal a sunny, cream-colored waiting hall, outfitted with sleek Alvar Aalto chairs and an ingenious wrought-iron torchiere. “Right this way, pork chop…” said Rybakov. “Follow me…”

They gained the living room, which was also inoffensively cream-colored except for what looked like a Kandinsky triptych taking up an entire wall. Beneath the Kandinsky, two sets of sofas and recliners were arranged around a projection television. Beyond was a dining room where an overextended chandelier hung centimeters above a grand rosewood table. As big as the apartment was, the furniture seemed destined for a place even bigger. Just wait and see, said the furniture.

Vladimir took in this tableau as slowly as he could, his gaze settling, of course, on the Kandinsky. “The painting…” Vladimir managed to say.

“Oh, that. It’s just something Miss Harosset picked up at auction. She keeps trying to sell me on abstract expressionism. But just look at that thing! This Kanunsky guy was obviously some sort of a pederast. Ah, let me tell you, Volodya, I’m a simple man. I ride the subway and iron my own shirts. I don’t need money or modern art! A cozy outhouse, some dried fish, a young woman to call out my name… This is my philosophy!”

“Miss Harosset,” Vladimir said. “She’s… your social worker?”

Mr. Rybakov laughed brightly. “Yeah, social worker,” he said. “That’s it exactly. Ah, Volodya, you’re lucky to be so young. Now sit down. I’ll make tea. Don’t let these fool you.” He waved a crutch at Vladimir. “I’m a sailor!”

He disappeared through a pair of French doors. Vladimir sat down at one end of the table, more appropriate for a state dinner than for a sip of tea, and looked around. A string instrument not unlike a Russian balalaika hung on one wall along with several yellowing military certificates. On the opposite wall, there was only a framed black-and-white photograph showing the face of a frowning young man bearing the Fan Man’s thick brows and light green eyes. A cold sore stretched along much of his pouted lower lip like an excavation in progress.

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.

3. FATHERS AND SONS

“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:

“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.

4. WOMEN AND THE VLADIMIR QUESTION

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…”

So, you see, young Vladimir had been more than willing to accept the loss of his freedom and formal education, if only he would be left alone with his warm feather bed and his Chekhov and his good friend Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe. But Mother and Grandmother and Father, when he returned from work at the hospital, would not leave him in peace. They fought his bronchial asthma without respite and with the entire Soviet Medical Encyclopedia and several less reliable tracts at their disposal. They would roll Vladimir’s pale body into hourly rubbing alcohol compresses, hold his face within centimeters of a boiling pot of potatoes, and practice the surreal ritual of “cupping”: A set of small glass cups was painfully attached (after a lit match was used to create a vacuum inside each vessel) across the length of Vladimir’s back in order to suck out the phlegm that rumbled through the invalid’s body. The Stegosaurus Effect, Dr. Girshkin called the wretched rows of glass assembled on his son’s back.

NOW THE HEALTHY, older Vladimir paced the length of his imaginary study, in which his childhood volume of Chekhov would share pride of place with newer acquisitions: a martini shaker from the Salvation Army, a biography of William Burroughs, a tiny cigarette lighter cleverly embedded within a hollowed pebble. Yes, the inside of the apartment was becoming too cluttered for Chekhov—there were Challah’s batons and whips and jars of K-Y to consider, not to mention the cheap Fourteenth Street spice racks that kept falling off their hooks, and the numerous buckets of cold water Vladimir kept around the kitchen and bedroom so that he could dunk his head when he could no longer stand the temperate status quo. But still, what a pleasure to be alone. To talk to oneself as if to a best friend. His actual best friend, Baobab, was still down in Miami, being venal and unsavory.

AND THEN IT was time. Challah was at the door fighting the locks. Vladimir closed his mind, worked himself up an erection, and went out to greet her. There she was. But even before he took in her workday face—the lipstick, mascara, and blush melting down in the heat, drawing a second ethereal face a notch below her all-too-real one—she was embracing him and whispering “happy birthday” in his ear, for unlike every other well-wisher of the day, Challah wanted to say it quietly.

Dear Challah with the warm, flat nose, the enormous eyelashes tickling his cheeks, the heavy nasal breathing—queen of everything musky and mammal-like. Soon she noticed what Vladimir had been preparing for her below, the aardvark’s tubular snout poking out from within its wiry hedge, and said, “Goodness,” in perfect mock surprise. She began unlatching the safety pins that kept together the swatches of black fabric she wore to the Dungeon but Vladimir said, “No, I must do it!”

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t rip anything.” She made sure he remained erect while he undressed her; the undressing went on for some time. When she was done, only the iron crucifixes remained against her heavy breasts, reminding Vladimir of artillery pieces scattered about a plain. Finally, with her crosses jangling, and his member in hand, Challah took Vladimir into the bedroom.

On the futon, he recalled his mandate: be thorough. He kissed, rubbed his nose against, tugged with his teeth, pinched between thumb and middle finger, poked with what Challah had termed the Girshkin Gherkin, every part of her, even parts that he had grown weary of with the passage of time: the folds that collected on top of her hips, her arms, thick and pink, that pressed him to her not lustfully but the way he envisioned a mother would grasp her child at the approach of an avalanche.

Finally, when he felt a full gathering of steam between his legs, he went between hers, and for the first time, looked into her face. Dear Challah, dear American friend, with that crimson look of arousal, but also with the restraint to keep Vladimir from biting into her neck or plunging into her mouth, just so she could look into his eyes when they were this close.

So Vladimir closed his eyes. And had a vision.

DRESSED IN LIGHTWEIGHT cotton chinos and tunic, a brown Nat Sherman’s cigarette implanted in his mouth, his hair fashionably cut short and continuously waved over to one side by a playful summer wind, Vladimir Borisovich Girshkin issued directives into a cellular phone as he walked along an airstrip. Granted, it was a lousy airstrip. There was not even a plane. But a series of properly spaced white lines etched into the cracked concrete could only mean an airstrip (or else a provincial highway, but, no, that couldn’t be).

While in bed, the blind, naked Vladimir was keeping up his hump hump with Challah in a desperate bid to orgasm, his fashionable doppelganger in the vision was making progress against the substantial length of the airstrip, beyond which a half-circle of the setting sun, bloated and patchy like rotting fruit, peeked out from the confluence of two gray mountains. Vladimir could clearly see the new Vladimir, his purposeful gait, his agitated face spanning the range of ill humor, but he could not understand precisely what he was saying into the cellular, why the airstrip was isolated by scrub fields on all sides save for the mountains, why he could not daydream himself a plane, fabulous companions, and a set of filled champagne flutes…

And then, just as the coital Vladimir was to reach his elusive target with Challah, the imaginary Vladimir heard a rumble, a boom, a sonic displacement directly above him. A hawk-nosed turbo prop was skirting the runway, headed directly for our hero, flying low enough for him to see the lone figure in the cockpit, or at least the lunatic glimmer in the pilot’s eye that could only have belonged to one man. “I’m coming for you, boy!” Mr. Rybakov was shouting into Vladimir’s cellular. “Away we go!”

HE OPENED HIS eyes. His face was sandwiched in between Challah’s shoulder blades where a constellation of beauty marks formed a soup ladle. The ladle lifted and lowered with her breathing, a lock of her orange hair fell into it.

Vladimir propped himself up on one elbow. In her free time Challah had repainted their bedroom a dentist’s-office mauve. She had arranged overlapping retro posters (condensed-milk advertisements and the like) across the ceiling. She had gone out and bought a squash, which now rotted in the corner. “Why did you close your eyes?” she asked.

“What?” He knew what.

“You know what.”

“Most people close their eyes. I was overcome.”

She burrowed her head into the middle of a pillow, swelling up the sides. “You were not overcome.”

“Are you saying I don’t love you?”

“You’re saying you don’t love me.”

“This is ridiculous.”

She turned around but covered herself with her arms and drew in her legs. “How can you say ‘this is ridiculous’? People don’t say things like that unless they just don’t give a shit. How can you be so flippant? ‘This is ridiculous.’ How can you be so detached?”

“I’m a foreigner. I speak slowly and choose my words with care, lest I embarrass myself.”

“How can you say that?”

“Well, what the hell am I allowed to say?”

“I’m fat!” she shouted. She glanced around as if looking for something to throw, then grabbed a roll of her own flesh, the one that collected beneath her breasts before her stomach began. “Say the truth!”

The truth?

“You hate me!”

No, that wasn’t the truth exactly. Vladimir didn’t hate her. He hated the idea of her, but that was different. Still, it was Vladimir who had invited this big woman into his life, and now there was no recourse but to sift through his meager vocabulary of comforting words, to put together the proper blandishments. You’re not fat, he thought, you’re fully realized. But before he could voice those tenuous thoughts, he noticed a large, complicated insect, a sort of roach with wings, hovering directly beneath the canopy of posters. Vladimir moved to defend his crotch.

In the meantime, Challah had let go of her roll of flesh, which fell in luxuriously with its grander compatriot, the stomach. She turned back into her pillow and breathed in so deeply that Vladimir was sure she was going to exhale in tears.

“There’s a strange insect coming down on you,” Vladimir preempted her.

Challah looked up. “A-a—”

They scampered off the futon as the beast landed between them. “Give me my T-shirt,” Challah demanded, once again covering herself with her arms as best she could.

The intruder crawled along the crests and ridges of their bed sheets the way a big-rig truck weaves along a mountain highway, then executed a great leap forward into Vladimir’s pillow. It was really something! In Leningrad the roaches were small and lacked initiative.

Challah leaned over and blew at the monster hopefully, but its wings began to stir and she drew back. “God, I just want to go to sleep,” she said, putting on her long T-shirt with a childhood character Vladimir was not familiar with, a comical blue imp. “I’ve been up since six. An assistant DA wanted an entire tea service set up on his back.”

“You’re not submitting?”

She shook her head.

“If some lawyer touches you—”

“No one’s touching me. They know.”

He came around the bed and put his arm around her. She pulled away a little. He kissed her shoulder and before he could do otherwise, he started to cry—it happened very easily sometimes, now that his father was not around to object. She held him and he felt himself a very small man in her arms. On the futon, the insect remained in charge, so they went out to the fire escape and smoked cigarettes. She was crying too now with the cigarette in her hand, wiping her nose into her palm so that Vladimir worried her hair would catch fire from the cigarette, and he moved to clean her nose for her.

They drank a cheap Hungarian riesling that spelled “headache” after the third glass. They held hands. The lights were going out at the Garibaldi nursing home across the street, a five-story residence built in the sixties to prove how closely a building could resemble Formica. The Jamaican record store on the first floor, three Bob Marley records and a lot of dope for sale, was gearing up for the night’s business, the volume of the reggae constrained by the whims of the sleepy Garibaldi denizens across the street. Along with the cops, they had reached a sort of negotiated settlement, Alphabet City style, with the profitable Rastafarians. Everyone left everyone alone, the music stayed low.

“Hey, in three months I’ll be twenty-five,” she said.

“It’s no big deal, turning twenty-five,” Vladimir said. Immediately he felt bad. Maybe it was a big deal to her. “I just got a thousand dollars from a client,” Vladimir said. “Maybe we can go to a nice French restaurant for your birthday. The one with that famous plat de mer. I read about it in the paper. Four kinds of oysters, a very special crawfish—”

“A client gave you a thousand dollars,” Challah said. “What did you have to do to him?”

“Nothing!” Vladimir said. He shuddered at the implication. “It was just a tip. I’m helping him get his citizenship. Anyway, this plat de mer…”

“You know I hate those slimy things,” Challah said. “Let’s just go out for a really good hamburger. Like at that fancy diner. The one we went to for Baobab’s birthday.”

Hamburger? She wanted to eat a hamburger on her twenty-fifth birthday? Vladimir remembered his parents upcoming barbecue, an event replete with many hamburgers. Could he invite Challah? Could she wear something decent? Could she pretend she was attending medical school where Vladimir had discreetly placed her in the Girshkin family imagination?

“That fancy diner sounds perfect,” Vladimir said, kissing Challah’s peeling lips. “We’ll get Caesar’s salads for everyone, gourmet relish, pitchers of sangria, the works…” And the next time they had sex he would keep his eyes open. He would look into her eyes directly. This is what one did to keep a relationship going. These were the desperate measures. Vladimir knew the drill. Preserving his fief, no matter how meager, this is what it meant to be an older, wiser Vladimir.

5. THE HOME FRONT

THE WEEKEND FOUND Dr. Girshkin sweating beneath the midday sun, his bald spot browning like a flapjack on the griddle, as he gestured about with a giant beefsteak tomato. “It is the biggest tomato in New York State,” he told Vladimir as he showed it off from every angle possible. “I must write to the Ministry of Agriculture. Maybe they have a prize for someone like me.”

“You’re a masterful gardener,” whispered Vladimir, trying to hustle some encouragement into his faltering voice.

It wasn’t easy. Having spent this strange June morning watching oversized radishes bask in the suburban haze, Vladimir had noticed a new and disturbing fact about his father: His father was old. He was a short, bald man, not unlike Vladimir when it came to his slight frame and dark oval face. And although his chest remained firm from the constant fishing and gardening, the black carpet of hair covering it had recently turned gray, his perfect posture had deteriorated, and his long aquiline nose had never looked so frail and thin, the skin around it so sun-wrinkled.

“You know, if the dollar collapses, and we’re all reduced to an agrarian lifestyle,” Vladimir said, “this one tomato can be an entire entrée.”

“Why, sure,” the doctor said. “A big vegetable can go a long way. There were times during the war when one carrot would feed a family for days. For instance, during the siege of Leningrad, your grandma and I, well…if truth be told, we were nowhere near Leningrad. We fled to the Ural Mountains at the start of the war. But there was nothing to eat there either. All we had was Tolik the Hog. A big fellow—we ate him for five years. We even bartered jars of lard for yarn and kerosene. The whole household ran off that hog.” He looked sadly at his son as if he wished he had saved a tailbone or some other memento. Then he had another idea.

“Mother!” he shouted to Vladimir’s grandmother, dozing in her wheelchair underneath the giant oaks that delineated the Girshkins’ property from that of their supposedly megalomaniac Indian neighbor. “Remember that hog we had? Tolik?”

Grandma lifted the brim of her floppy straw hat with her good hand. “What did you say?”

“Tolik the Hog,” shouted Vladimir’s father.

Grandma’s eyes widened. “So how come that swine never writes me, that’s what I want to know,” she said, waving a little fist at the doctor and his son. “Boston is close enough, you’d think he’d come down and visit me. I practically raised that bastard after his mother died.”

“No, not Cousin Tolik,” Dr. Girshkin shouted. “I’m talking about Tolik the Hog. Remember, during the war? In the Urals? He got so big we rode him into town. Remember the hog?”

“Oh,” said Grandma. “Oh, yes. I remember a beast. But it wasn’t a hog, it was a cow, and her name was Masha.”

“Masha was after the war!” shouted Dr. Girshkin. He turned to Vladimir. Father and son briefly looked at each other and shrugged, each in his own way.

“Why would we have a hog?” reasoned Grandma, slowly wheeling herself over from her self-designated post, leaving the oaks defenseless before the Indian and his mythical power saw. “We’re Jewish, aren’t we? Sure, your wife eats that pork salami from the Russian store, and I do too sometimes, because that’s what’s in the refrigerator. But an entire hog?”

She settled her bewildered gaze on the tomato patch.

“She’s nearing the sunset, slowly but surely,” said Dr. Girshkin. “Sometimes she thinks there’s two of me. The good Boris and the evil Boris. If I let her guard the oak trees until she falls asleep, and that can be as late as eight or nine o’clock, then I’m the good Boris. The one that’s not married to your mother. If I take her in early, she’ll curse at me like a sailor. And you know that in the autumn it gets damn cold no matter how many jackets I put on her.”

“That’s what awaits us all,” Vladimir said, which was the Girshkin family’s definitive pronouncement on aging and mortality. It was a perfect time to say it, too, for there they were now, assembled in a perfect row—three generations of Girshkins in sad decline: Grandma getting ready to say good-bye to this world, his father already with one toe in the grave, and Vladimir, the third generation, going through all the motions of a living death.

But the first to go would be Grandma, that devoted country baba who had once bought Vladimir his first American cotton windbreaker—the only grown-up to realize that his trendy Hebrew school chums were making fun of his ill-fitting overcoat with its inherent East Bloc smell; the only one to understand the pain in being called a Stinky Russian Bear.

Grandma’s first stroke happened five years ago. For some time she had suspected Tselina Petrovna, her clueless neighbor, of a dastardly plan to denounce her to the Social Security Administration and steal her subsidized apartment. One quiet, snowy night it would happen. The Black Marias would roll up to her building, there would be a knock on the door, and the Social Security Police would drag Grandma away.

Grandma begged Vladimir to translate a letter of denouncement against Tselina, citing her for being a British spy. Or was it an East German spy? A Russian, French, or Finnish spy? Everything was topsy-turvy in this country. “Tell me what kind of spy!” Grandma shouted at Vladimir.

Her grandson tried to humor her, but Grandma wept and accused the family of abandoning her. That same night she had the stroke. After the stroke she had a heart attack and then another stroke.

The doctors were astounded by the resiliency of her body, attributing it to her long life in the countryside. Yet even after she was wheelchair-bound and paralyzed on one side, Grandma could not shake her belief that the Social Security men were due any minute. It happened to her cousin Aaron in Kiev in 1949. A pianist by profession, he had had half his fingers amputated in a frozen Kamchatka labor camp. There were lessons to be learned from that.

Finally, Vladimir’s father moved Grandma out to the suburbs, where she soon found a new enemy in the face of the “murderous, tree-chopping Hindu” of a neighbor, who had once remarked on the size and beauty of the oak trees straddling the property line. And that’s how her heroic vigil in the backyard began.

Vladimir stood behind Grandmother patting her sparse hair. He found a space between two moles atop the warm, wrinkled globe of her forehead and kissed her there, eliciting an astonished look from his father, Grandmother’s official keeper. What’s this? Dr. Girshkin seemed to be saying. Co-conspirators in my own house?

“Of course, there’s no hog, babushka,” Vladimir spoke softly. “Who raises hogs in Westchester? It’s just not done.”

Grandmother grabbed his hand and bit it affectionately with both of her teeth. “My dear one!” she said. “My only one!” And she was right. They were in this together. Mother and Father may have gone ahead and become rich Americans, but Grandma and Vladimir were still of the same blood, as if a generation had been skipped between them.

After all, she had raised Vladimir, teaching him to write Cyrillic letters when he was four, awarding two grams of cheese for every Slavonic squiggle mastered. She would take him each Sunday to the Piskaryovko mass grave for the defenders of Leningrad—that most instructive of Russia’s field trips—where they would leave fresh daisies for his grandfather Moysei, a slight, thoughtful man shyly holding on to Grandma’s elbow in wedding photos, who perished in a tank battle on the city’s outskirts. And after this simple reckoning in front of a statue of the Motherland, weeping over an eternal flame, Grandma would ceremoniously tie a red handkerchief around Vladimir’s neck. Asthma or not, she promised him, he would join the Red Pioneers someday and then the Komsomol Youth League and then, if he behaved himself well, the Communist Party. “To fight for the cause of Lenin and the Soviet people, are you ready!” she would drill him.

“Always ready!” he would shout back.

But, in the end, the Red Pioneers would have to march on without him…In the end, in the late 1970s, to be exact, the gentle, toothy American Jimmy Carter swapped tons of Midwestern grain for tons of Soviet Jews, and suddenly Vladimir and Grandmother found themselves walking out of the International Arrivals Building at JFK. They took one look at the endless America humming her Gershwin tune before them and cried in each other’s arms.

And this was Grandma today—wheelchair-bound, imprisoned in one of the world’s most expensive backyards, the rustle of stealth station wagons sliding into adjacent driveways, meat burning everywhere, her grandson a grown man with dark circles under his eyes who came to visit his family seasonally, as if they lived in the wilds of Connecticut and not some twenty kilometers beyond the Triborough Bridge.

Yes, Grandma deserved at least one more kiss from Vladimir, but kissing the old woman in front of his father made Vladimir uncomfortable. Grandmother was Dr. Girshkin’s life, his burden and domain, just as Mother was Vladimir’s. Perhaps after the barbecue, if he still felt this tender and bereft, he could smooch her in private.

“People! Opa!” They looked up. Mother was leaning out of her third-floor study, waving a bottle of rum. “He’ll be twenty-six soon. Get out that grill!”

“TODAY I FOUND a new nickname for your father,” Mother announced. “I’m calling him Stalin.”

“Ha,” Vladimir’s father said, as he stuffed a flaming weenie into a bun for Grandma. “My wife warms my heart like a second sun.”

“Stalin had very nice whiskers,” Grandma encouraged her boy. “Now, let’s drink, everybody! To Vladimir, our bright American future!”

Plastic cups were raised. “To our American future!”

“To our American future!” Mother toasted. “Well, I had a long talk with Vladimir this week, and I think he’s sounding more mature.”

“Is that true?” asked Dr. Girshkin of his son. “You told her you would become a lawyer?”

“Don’t peg him, Iosef Vissarionovich,” said Mother, using Stalin’s patronymic. “There are a million mature things Vladimir can become.”

“Computer,” Grandma grunted. She considered computer programmers as men and women of immense power. The Social Security people were always checking their computer whenever Grandma braved a call to their offices, and they had the power to ruin her life!

“There you go,” said Mother. “Grandma is crazy, but wise in her own way. I still say, though, you should be a lawyer. You were such a convincing little liar at the debating society, even with that horrific accent of yours. And I know it’s no longer polite to talk about such things, but I must say the money is tremendous.”

“I hear Eastern Europe is where you make the money these days,” Vladimir said with a knowledgeable air. “This friend of mine, his son owns an import-export business in Prava. A Russian fellow by the name of Groundhog…”

“Groundhog?” Mother shouted. “Did you hear that, Boris? Our son is cavorting with some Russian Groundhog. Vladimir, I expressly forbid you to associate with any Groundhogs from this day forward.”

“But he’s a businessman,” Vladimir said. “His father, Rybakov, lives in a penthouse. Perhaps he can get a job for me! Why, I thought you’d be pleased.”

“We all know what kind of businessman calls himself Groundhog,” Mother said. “Where is he from? Odessa? An import-export business! A penthouse! If you want to be in real business, Vladimir, you have to listen to your mother. I’ll help you get a management consulting job at McKinsey or Arthur Andersen. Then, if you’re a good boy, I’ll even pay for your MBA. Yes, that’s the strategy we should pursue!”

“Prava,” Dr. Girshkin mused, brushing stray drops of Coca-Cola from his whiskers. “Isn’t that the Paris of the 90s?”

“Are you encouraging him, Stalin?” Mother threw down her hot dog like a gauntlet. “You want him to join the criminal element? Maybe he can be a consultant to your medical practice… Help you defraud our poor government. Why should we have only one crook in the family?”

“Medicare fraud is not really a crime,” Dr. Girshkin said, clasping his hands in a professional manner. “What’s more, my love, all my new patients are paying for your goddamn dacha in Sag Harbor. See, Volodya,” he turned to his son, “there’s a whole wave of Jewish Uzbeks on the way from Tashkent and Bukhara. Such sweet people. So new to Medicare. But it’s just too much work for me. Last week I put in forty hours.”

“Too much work!” Mother shouted. “Don’t you ever say that in front of Vladimir. That’s where his cult of sloth originates, you know. That’s why he’s keeping company with some Groundhog in his penthouse. He has hardly any role models in this family. I’m the only one who truly works in this house. You just slip your claims into the mailbox. Grandma—you’re a pensioner.”

Grandma took this to be her cue. “I think he’s getting married to a shiksa,” she said waving an accusative index finger at Vladimir.

“You’re being crazy again, Mother,” said Dr. Girshkin. “He’s dating Challah. Little Challatchka.”

“When do we get to meet Challatchka?” asked Vladimir’s mother. “It’s been how long? Almost a year?”

“How impolite,” said Dr. Girshkin. “What are we… savages, that you’re ashamed of us?”

“She’s in summer school,” Vladimir said. He uncovered the dessert plate full of imported Russian candies from his childhood, the chocolaty Clumsy Bear and the caramel-fudgy Little Cow. “All day long, taking classes,” he mumbled. “She’ll finish medical school in record time.”

“She really is inspiring,” Mother said. “Women seem more adjusted in this country anyway.”

“Well, to women,” said Vladimir’s father, raising his cup. “And to the mysterious Challah who keeps our son’s heart!” They toasted. It was time to set the hamburger meat aflame.

AFTER IT WAS over, Mother lay in her mass-produced four-poster bed, nursing a bottle of rum, while Vladimir paced around her enormous berth lecturing on the topic of the day: Sensitivity to African-Americans. One black marketing director was about to be sacked, and Mother wanted to sack him “in the new, sensitive fashion.”

In the course of an hour, Vladimir pitted everything he learned during his stint at the progressive Midwestern college against Mother’s peerless Russian racism. “So what are you telling me?” Mother said when the lesson was over. “I should bring up the middle passage?”

Vladimir tried again to paint the big picture, but Mother was drunk. He told her as much. “So I’m drunk,” said Mother. “You want a drink? Here—wait, no, you might have gotten herpes off that girl. There’s a glass on the dresser.”

Vladimir accepted a glassful of rum. Mother grabbed a post and hoisted herself up until she was on her knees. “Jesus, our Lord,” she said, “please shepherd helpless Vladimir away from his tragic lifestyle, from the legacy his father bequeathed him, from the pauper’s flat which he calls home, and from this criminal Groundhog…” She put her hands together but started to tip over.

Vladimir caught her by one shoulder. “That’s a pretty prayer, Mother,” he said. “But we’re, you know…” He lowered his voice out of habit: “Jewish.”

Mother looked at his face carefully, as if she had forgotten something and it had gone into hiding beneath one of Vladimir’s thick brows. “Yes, I know that,” she said, “but it’s all right to pray to Jesus. Your grandfather was a gentile, you know, and his father was a deacon. And I still pray to the Jewish God, the main God, although, I have to say, he hasn’t been helping much lately.

“I mean, what do you think?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Vladimir. “I guess it’s all right. Do you feel good when you pray like that? To Jesus and to… Isn’t there something else? The Holy Something?”

“I’m not sure,” said Mother. “I can look it up. I got a little brochure on the subway.”

“Well, anyway,” Vladimir said, “you can pray to everyone you want, just don’t tell Father. With Grandma losing her mind, he’s been more into the Jewish God than ever.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing!” Mother said. She grabbed Vladimir and held him against her tiny frame. “We’re so much alike underneath all your stubbornness!” she said.

Vladimir gently detached himself from his mother and reached for the rum, which he drank from the bottle, herpes be damned. “You look good now,” Mother said. “Like a real man. All you have to do is trim that homo ponytail.” A teardrop formed in the corner of her left eye. Then one in the right. They overfilled and commenced to flow. “I’m not crying hysterically,” Mother assured him.

Vladimir looked over his mother’s peroxide-blond curls (no longer was she the Mongolka of Leningrad days). He surveyed the running mascara and soaked blush. “You look good, too,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Thank you,” she sobbed.

He took out a tissue from his pants pocket and handed it to her. “It’s clean,” he said.

“You’re a clean boy,” she said, blowing her nose ferociously.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” he said. “I think it’s time for me to go home now.” He walked over to the largest oak door in Scarsdale, New York, beheld its lucent door knob carved from Bohemian crystal, which he had always been too scared to smudge when he was a teenager; come to think of it, was scared still.

“Bye-bye,” he said in English.

There was no answer. He turned around to take one last look. Mother was staring at his feet. “Dosvedanya,” Vladimir said.

Mother continued to appraise his feet. “I’m leaving,” Vladimir announced. “I’m going to go kiss Grandmother good-bye, then catch the 4:51 train.” The thought of this train cheered him immediately. Express train to Manhattan now departing Scarsdale station. All aboard!

He was almost out of the woods. He was turning the knob, smudging the Bohemian crystal with all five fingers and a soft, sooty palm, when Mother issued a directive: “Vladimir, walk over to the window,” she said.

“What’s there?”

“Quickly, please. Without your father’s trademark hesitation.”

Vladimir did as he was told. He looked out the window. “What am I looking for?” he asked. “Grandma’s by the oak trees again. She’s throwing branches at the Indian.”

“Forget your grandma, Vladimir. Walk back to the door. Just as I said, back to the door… Left foot, then the right foot… Now stop. Turn around. Back to the window once again. Walk naturally, the way you usually walk. Don’t try to control your feet, let them fall where they may…” She paused. She cocked her head to one side. She got down on one knee and looked at his feet from a new angle. She got up slowly, wordlessly sizing up her son.

“So it is true,” she said in a voice of complete exhaustion, a voice Vladimir remembered from their early American days, when she would run home from her English and typing lessons to make him his favorite Salad Olivier—potatoes, canned peas, pickles, and diced ham tossed with a half-jar of mayonnaise. Sometimes she’d fall asleep at the table of their tiny Queens flat, a long knife in one hand, an English-Russian dictionary in the other, a row of pickles lined up on the chopping block, their fate uncertain.

“What do you mean?” Vladimir said presently. “What is true?”

“Vladimir, how can I say this? Please don’t be cross with me. I know you’ll be cross with me, you’re such a soft young man. But if I don’t tell you the truth, will I be fulfilling my motherly duties? No, I will not. The truth then…” She sighed deeply, an alarming sigh, the sigh of exhaling the last doubt, the sigh of preparing for battle. “Vladimir,” she said, “you walk like a Jew.”

“What?”

“What? The anger in his voice. What? he says. What? Walk back to the window now. Just walk back to the window. Look at your feet. Look carefully. Look at how your feet are spread apart. Look at how you walk from side to side. Like an old Jew from the shtetl. Little Rebbe Girshkin. Oh, now he’s going to scream at me! Or maybe he’s going to cry. Either way, he’s going to hurt his mother. That’s how he repays his lifelong debt to her, by tearing her to shreds like a wolf.

“Oh, poor, poor Challah. Do you know how sorry I feel for your girlfriend, Vladimir… Think about it, how can a man love a woman when he despises his own mother? It can’t be done. And how can a woman love a man who walks like a Jew? I honestly don’t see what keeps you two together.”

“I think many people walk the way I do,” Vladimir whispered.

“Maybe in Amatevka,” Mother said. “In the Vilnius ghetto, maybe. You know, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person. Come here! No? He’s shaking his head like a little three-year-old… You don’t want to? Well, just stand there like an idiot, then!”

Vladimir was looking at her drawn and tired face, a residue of anger still pulsing along the upper lip. She was waiting for him, her patience ebbing, a slender laptop perched by the bedside urgently bleating for her attention. He wanted to comfort her. What could he do?

Perhaps, he resolved, perhaps he could improvise his own kind of love for his mother, cobbled together from past memories of an earlier mother—a harassed Leningrad kindergarten teacher and her love for her half-dead boy, the Soviet patriot, the best friend of Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe, the ten-year-old Chekhovian.

He could take her twice-a-day phone calls, pretend to listen dutifully to her screams and sobs, while holding the receiver several centimeters away from his face as if the telephone itself could explode.

He could lie to her, tell her he would do better, because even the invention of the lie meant he knew what was expected of him, knew that he was failing her.

And, undoubtedly, he could do one other thing for her.

It would be the least he could do…

VLADIMIR WALKED OVER to his mother, his feet a pair of Hebraic automatons steadily crossing the crisp parquet, wishing that he could Jew-walk his way back to Manhattan.

“Show me how it’s done,” Vladimir said.

Mother kissed both his cheeks and rubbed his shoulders, poking with her index finger at his spine. “Straighten up, sinotchek,” she said. My little son. He had been out of her good graces too long: that one word made him wheeze with pleasure. “My treasure,” she added, knowing he would belong to her for the rest of the day, never mind the 4:51 train to Manhattan. “I’ll teach you how it’s done. You’ll walk like me, an elegant walk, everyone knows who they’re dealing with when I walk into a room. Straighten up. I’ll teach you…”

And she taught him. He took his first baby steps to her delight. It was all in the posture. You, too, could walk like a gentile. You had to keep your chin in the air. The spine straight.

Then the feet would follow.