The Russian Debutante's Handbook

12. THE SEARCH FOR MONEY

PRESENTLY, THE TRUTH became obvious: state-sponsored socialism had been a good thing. Vladimir spent his waking hours daydreaming of the simple life of his parents. A walk along the Neva River with your intended: no charge. Box of stale chocolates and one wilted rose: fifty kopeks. Tickets for two to the Worker’s Allegorical Puppet Theater: one ruble, ten kopeks (student rate). Now that was courtship! Empty wallets, empty stores, hearts filled with overflowing… If only he and Frannie could travel back in time, away from the crude avarice of this uncultured metropolis, back to those tender Khrushchev nights.

Vladimir woke up with a start. Oh? And what the hell was this? A daredevil roach was making her way up the death blades of the paper shredder. An enterprising couple in ethnic garb was wrestling with an acculturation facilitator over a set of fingerprints. Dah! He was at work! The Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, that nonprofit gulag, was open for business!

Yes, all the signs pointed to his somnolent weekday money-making, every hour bringing with it another U.S.$8.00. He had been asleep from nine to noon. Three hours. Twenty-four dollars. Two dry martinis and a tapa of jamon serrano. A Bombay silk handkerchief for Fran.

“Not enough,” he said aloud. A recent tête-à-tête with his calculator had pinpointed the need for an additional $32,280 per year to meet Challah’s rent and the most basic Fran-based expenditures. With needy eyes he surveyed his little precinct. A junior clerk at the adjacent desk was effortlessly inhaling her homemade noodles and octopus, glancing impatiently at her faux Cartier watch with every breath of food.

“Mmph,” the junior clerk said.

This mindless grunt set Vladimir off on a trail of thoughts which brought him, in a roundabout way, back to the money-centered dreams he had been dreaming for the past three hours, and there, in the middle distance, suspended in the air, there floated…an Idea. A turbo-prop flying over a deserted landing strip, its pilot a certain Soviet sailor-invalid.

It took eight rings for Mr. Rybakov to hop over to his phone. “Allo! Allo!” the breathless Fan Man said. There was splashing in the background. The grind of machinery. A kind of improvised yodeling. Well, someone was starting his afternoon on a high note.

“Allo, Mr. Rybakov. Vladimir Girshkin, your resettlement specialist and faithful servant.”

“And it’s about time,” Rybakov shouted. “The Fan and I were wondering…”

“My apologies. Work, work. The business of America is business, as they say. Listen, I was just inquiring about your case in Washington—”

Vladimir stopped. Okay. That was a lie. Not so hard. Just like lying to Mother. Or pretending with Challah. Now what?

“Washington,” said the Fan Man. “Columbia District. That’s our nation’s capital! Oh, you crafty little fuck… Well done!”

Vladimir took a deep breath. He tugged on his polyester tie. It was time for the pitch. It was time for the money. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could reimburse me for the plane fare.”

“Of course. Plane fare. Such trifles. How much?”

Vladimir tried on a few sums. “Five hundred dollars,” he said.

“Flying first-class, I see. Only the best for my Girshkin. Say, let’s meet around five. I’ll give you the money and we’ll take the SS Brezhnev for a harbor run.”

“SS Brezhnev?” Had Mr. Rybakov peeked into Vladimir’s socialist dreams?

“My new speedboat.”

“Capital,” Vladimir said.

AT THE APPOINTED time Vladimir squeezed into an elevator. At ground level he found his own tattered compatriots from the office (their loafers scuffed and unpolished, their dresses acrylic blends from bargain basements) flushed out onto Broadway: a single nonprofit ray amid the gleaming masses of the surrounding law offices and investment firms. He quickly crossed the high-rise graveyard of Battery Park City, and arrived, red-cheeked and winded, at the marina.

The SS Brezhnev was a cigarette boat—long, thin, and sleek, a veritable Francesca of the seas—bobbing playfully between two gargantuan yachts, both under the blue flag of Hong Kong, both looking bloated and unwieldy in comparison to their neighbor.

“Ahoy,” Mr. Rybakov cried in English, waving his captain’s hat.

Vladimir clambered onto the boat and hugged the happy Rybakov. He noticed that both he and his host were wearing vintage trousers, plaid shirts, and shiny ties. Throw in the guyabera and janitor pants, and the two of them could start their own clothing line.

“Welcome aboard, friend,” Rybakov said. “A pleasant day for a sail, no? The air is clear, the water placid. And here I have prepared a parcel with your reimbursement and a complimentary sailing cap.”

“Thank you, Admiral. Why, it fits just perfectly.” Now the look was complete.

“I’ve had Brezhnev’s likeness imprinted on the back. And allow me to introduce you to Vladko, my maritime Serb and first mate. Vladko! Come meet Vladimir Girshkin.”

A hatch opened, and from the lower deck there emerged a preternaturally tall, round-chested, pink-eyed, near-naked young man, as substantial as anything Serbian myth ever produced. He blinked repeatedly and covered his eyes. Behind him, a large striped cat (or maybe a small tiger) roamed a devastated landscape of crushed tomato-soup cans, empty gas canisters, deflated soccer balls, and all kinds of time-worn Balkan paraphernalia: coats-of-arms, tricolors, blown-up photographs of fatigue-clad men with guns standing solemnly around makeshift graves.

“Ah, I believe we share practically the same name,” Vladimir told Vladko.

“Ne, ne,” the Serb protested, his expression still that of a man emerging from a bomb shelter. “I am Vladko.” Perhaps his Russian was limited.

“And this,” said Rybakov, pointing to a miniature fan mounted on the dashboard, “is the Fan’s little niece, Fanya.”

“I have had the pleasure of meeting your esteemed uncle,” Vladimir started to say.

“But she’s too young to talk!” Rybakov laughed. “Oh, you romantic cad.” He turned to the Serb: “Vladko, hey there! First mate on the bridge! Start the engines! Away we go!”

With a postindustrial hum like that of a desktop computer powering up, the Brezhnev’s engines were engaged. Vladko expertly navigated her past the hefty sloops of the marina, setting course around the southern tip of Manhattan Isle. A boat ride! Vladimir thought with childish glee. It was one of the million things he’d never done. Oh, the stench of the open sea!

“What did you see in Washington?” Mr. Rybakov shouted over the gnashing wind and roiling waters, both easily separated by the Brezhnev’s aerodynamic prow.

“Your case remains highly contentious,” Vladimir cheerfully lied. Yes, the key was to remain cheerful. Big smile. They were playing Ducking Reality, a delightful little game expressly designed for Russian émigrés. Why, Vladimir’s own grandmother was a national champion. “I have met with several members of the House Judiciary Committee…”

“So, I take it, you visited the president at his White House.”

“It was closed,” Vladimir said. And why was it closed? Easy enough. “The air-conditioning broke.”

“And they couldn’t turn on a few fans?” Rybakov shook his head and his fist in protest to the White House staff. “All these Americans are pigs. Air-conditioning. Hypermalls. Trash, these people. I ought to write another letter to the Times on the theme of ‘Where Is This Country Going?’ Except as a citizen I would have more clout.”

“Any day now,” Vladimir reassured him. It was good to keep these things open-ended.

“And did you see the president’s developing young daughter? That delightful creature!”

“I caught a glimpse of her at the Kennedy Center. She’s coming along nicely.” Now, this wasn’t even lying anymore. This was storytelling for invalids. This was social work. This was outreach to the elderly.

Rybakov rubbed his hands together and winked at Vladimir. Then he sighed and fingered the insignia on his cap. He wiped the water spray off his sunglasses. Leaning against the bow of his speedboat in his sunglasses and cap, this was as close as Mr. Rybakov had ever come to looking like a New World person—rich, American, in control. Vladimir was reminded of his own adolescent daydreams: young Vladimir, the simple-minded son of a local factory owner, running triumphantly down the field of his Hebrew school’s opulent Recreation Centrum, the eyes of the local Benetton-clad maidens following intently the brown oblong ball encased in his burly arms as he scored the “home goal” or “home run” or whatever it was he had to score. All in all, Vladimir’s American dreams formed a curious arc. During adolescence he dreamed of acceptance. In his brief days at college he dreamed of love. After college, he dreamed of a rather improbable dialectic of both love and acceptance. And now, with love and acceptance finally in the bag, he dreamed of money. What fresh tortures would await him next?

“Maybe next time you’re in Washington,” Mr. Rybakov was saying, “you could introduce me to the first daughter. We could go out for ice cream. A young lady like her could be very interested in my tales of the sea.”

Vladimir nodded his assent as the half-moon of southern Manhattan rapidly receded behind them. The skyscrapers, chief among them the World Trade Center towers, appeared as if they were rising directly out of the water (an almost Venetian effect), or as if they were perched on an offering platter.

“There she is!” Rybakov shouted to Vladko. They were fast approaching a cargo ship anchored midharbor, her hull rusted pink, her prow stenciled with the Cyrillic legend: Sovetskaya Vlast’, or Soviet Might. The vessel flew under the somber red-and-black flag of Armenia, which, as Vladimir remembered from his abbreviated Leningrad schooling, was a land-locked country. “Aha,” Vladimir said, his tone full of simulated good nature. “An Armenian flag on a ship. Now here’s a curious sight.”

Once the Brezhnev drew alongside the stern of the Vlast’, a rope was thrown overboard by an unseen Armenian sailor and speedily tethered to the Brezhnev by the indispensable Vladko. A metallic boat—no, a very uncomplicated raft, like the cover of a shoebox—was soon lowered as well. “I see the Armenians are expecting us,” Vladimir said. He suddenly thought of Francesca, of her proximity… Why, at this very moment, across the bay and only two kilometers uptown, she was returning from school to the Ruoccos’ bright little aerie, dropping her satchel by the bread-maker, washing the heat off her face in the cat’s bathroom with its oddly comforting smells. Yes, she was making Vladimir into a human being, an indigenous citizen of this world.

“What Armenians?” Rybakov said. “These are Georgians.”

“Georgians,” Vladimir said. It was better not to ask questions. But a note of fear sounded in the back of his head, that cramped space where his money dreams were also headquartered. Fear and money. They went well together.

Once the Georgians’ lifeboat was aligned with the Brezhnev, Vladko rushed over to help Rybakov aboard, but the sporty septuagenarian used his crutches to catapult himself inside. “Look at me!” he cheered. “I can still whack the both of you youngsters!”

“Which gun do I bring?” Vladko mumbled, saddened by his own irrelevance.

Gun? Vladimir’s Fear-Money gland coiled around his brain and squeezed gently. “We’ll be searched,” Rybakov said. “So you might as well bring something impossible to conceal, then turn it in immediately to show compliance. The Kalashnikov, say.”

Vladko disappeared below deck.

“Ensign!” the Fan Man said to Vladimir. “Hurry up. The television program about the comical black midget starts promptly at eight o’clock Eastern Standard Time. I cannot miss it.”

“You go on,” Vladimir said, pretending to play with Fanya, the little fan, as if he couldn’t be bothered with Mr. Rybakov’s little errands. “I will await your return.”

“Oho, what is this?” Rybakov said. “Your presence is both requested and required. We’re doing all this for you, you know. You don’t want to disappoint the Georgians.”

“Yes, clearly not,” Vladimir said. “But you must see my concerns. I am from Russia originally, this is true, but I am also from Scarsdale… From Westchester…” This seemed to eloquently sum up his concerns.

“And?”

“And I’m worried about… Well, Georgians, Kalashnikovs, violence. Stalin was a Georgian, you know.”

“What a pizdyuk you are,” Rybakov huffed, alluding to the kind of man who is somehow vagina-like in nature. “The Georgians take time out of their busy schedule to pay tribute to you, they’ve sailed around the world with duty-free gifts, and you cower like a milksop. Get in here!

“And I won’t have you badmouthing Stalin either,” he added.

THE TWO SEAMEN were the largest Georgians Vladimir had ever seen, each about two hundred pounds (the Vlast’ must have carried some incredible rations), and each with the gloomy oblong face and fertile black moustache common to the men of Caucasus.

“Vladimir Girshkin, these are Daushvili and Pushka, both associates of my son, the Groundhog.”

“Hurrah!” the two men said. But quietly.

The swarthier of the two, the one named Pushka, which, Vladimir assumed, was a nickname, for it meant “cannon” in Russian, said in a collegial tone: “And now we will go inside for the zakuski. You will have to give us your weapon, blondie.”

Vladko bowed and surrendered his immense Kalashnikov, the first weapon Vladimir had ever seen; the Georgians bowed back, and Vladko bowed yet again—a merger between two Japanese banks was now seemingly complete. They walked along the starboard of the Vlast’, Vladimir eyeing the Statue of Liberty across the harbor, wondering if any crime could be committed directly in her sight. The color she was painted, Soviet-cafeteria green, did not inspire confidence. Francesca, meanwhile, was likely hunting through the Arts section of the paper, rolling a cigarette over the coffee table, and planning a triumphant evening out for the two of them.

“Watch your little head, friend,” Daushvili said. They ducked into a humble room, unexposed pipework serving as roof, the walls decorated with pages of German automobile magazines and the occasional poster of Soviet pop diva Alla Pugacheva parading her strawberry bouffant at the EuroVision Song Contest, crooning her summertime hit “A Million Scarlet Roses.” The Georgians were seated around a long foldout table covered in zakuski. From afar, Vladimir could already spot the glossy blackness of cheap caviar flanked by plates of rusty herring. He was hoping for skewers of Georgian shashlik, preferably lamb, but there was no grill in sight.

The head of the group was not a captain or any kind of sailor. He was, as might be expected, dressed in sunglasses and Versace, as were the two associates to his right and left. All three had classic Indo-European faces: high, sloping foreheads; thin, albeit curved, noses; hazy traces of facial hair around the upper lip. The rest of the coterie was far coarser in appearance—bigger men with bushier mustaches, dressed in track suits. Half looked like Stalin, the other half like Beria. Several of them even wore sailor caps, although the crest of whatever navy they had once belonged to had long been removed.

“I am Valentin Melashvili,” the leader announced to Vladimir in a rumbling Bolshoi-grade bass. “The crew of the Sovetskaya Vlast’ express their admiration for you, Vladimir Borisovich. We have just heard of your rampage through Washington on Mr. Rybakov’s behalf. And, of course, we all follow the exploits of your enchanting mother, Yelena Petrovna, in the New Russian Word and the Kommersant Bizness Daily. Sit, sit… No, no, not there. At the head of the table, of course. And who is this gentleman?”

The Serb waved awkwardly, his hair an incongruous yellow mop in a sea of black curls. “Vladko, go outside,” Rybakov instructed. “We are with friends now. Go!”

First they disarm the Serb, then they throw him out altogether. “Death!” Vladimir’s Fear-Money gland was shouting. “Death is the very opposite of money.”

“Well, to begin with,” Melashvili said, “a toast to the Groundhog, our friend, our benefactor, our great mountain eagle circling the steppes… Za evo zdarovye!”

“Za evo zdarovye!” Vladimir cheered as he plucked a shot glass off the table. Now what the hell was he cheering about? Get a hold of yourself, Volodya.

“Za evo zdarovye!” Rybakov shouted.

“Za evo zdarovye,” the other Georgians said simply.

“So, here’s a question for you, Vladimir,” the charming Melashvili said. “I know you’ve been to university, so you might know the answer to this one. Question: Who on the Lord’s earth can match the hospitality and generosity of the Georgian people?”

Obviously a trick question. “No one,” Vladimir started to say, but Melashvili interrupted him. “The Groundhog!” he cried. “And to prove it, the Groundhog sends you fifty cartons of Dunhill cigarettes. Pushka, fetch the smokes! Look here. Five hundred packs. Ten thousand cigarettes. Sealed in cellophane to maximize freshness.”

Dunhills. Vladimir could easily unload them for two dollars a pack. He could set up a little stand on Broadway. He could call out to the jaded masses in his best immigrant accent, “Dunhill! Dunhill! Top 100 percent number one brand! I give special price! Only just for you!” He could make an even thousand dollars, which, added to the five hundred Mr. Rybakov had given him, would net him $1,500.00 for the day. Now, if he subtracted that amount from the $32,280 he needed for Francesca to love him forever, that would leave him… Let’s see, eight minus zero is eight, then carry the one… Ah, math was tricky business. Vladimir never had the patience. “Thank you, Mr. Melashvili, sir,” he said, “but, honestly, I do not deserve such favor. Who am I? I am only this young fellow.”

Melashvili reached over to ruffle Vladimir’s hair, soft and pliable from the application of Frannie’s Aboriginal Sunrise shampoo. “What gentle manners,” the Georgian said. “Truly, you are a child of St. Petersburg. Please take the Dunhills. Enjoy the European quality in good health. Now, may I ask another question? What do our Golden Youth wear on their wrists these days?”

Vladimir was stumped. “It’s a difficult question. Perhaps—”

“Personally,” Melashvili said, “I think nothing will do but this genuine Rolex watch. Recently acquired from Singapore. Completely legal. The control number has been removed from the back.”

Even better. At least fifteen hundred dollars from some fence on Orchard Street. Together with his previous loot, an even three thousand. “I will accept the Rolex with a heavy heart,” Vladimir said, “for how will I ever repay your kindness?” Hey, not bad! he thought. He was getting the hang of this. He executed a little bow, the kind of bow they all seemed to favor—Georgian, Russian, and Serb alike.

He had to admit it was a pleasure dealing with these people. They seemed so much more polite and cultured than the work-obsessed Americans who crowded Vladimir’s city. Sure, they likely committed all sorts of unfortunate violence in their off-hours, but then again, look how articuate this Melashvili was! He probably dropped in on Vladimir’s uncle Lev whenever he was in Petersburg and they went, together with their wives, to the Hermitage and maybe for some jazz afterward. Bravo! Yes, Vladimir was ready to listen and learn from these people. Maybe he could even introduce them to Fran. He did his little bow again. How can I repay your kindness? Indeed.

Melashvili bristled: “No, not our kindness at all,” he said. “We are merely travelers of the seas. The Groundhog! The Groundhog is to be thanked. Isn’t that so, Aleksander?”

“Yes,” Mr. Rybakov said. “Let us all thank my little Hog.”

The Georgians whispered their thank yous, but this was hardly enough for Mr. Rybakov. “Let’s go around the room,” he shouted. “The way they do on that fat schwartze’s talk show. Let’s talk about what we like most about working for the Groundhog.” Rybakov thrust an imaginary microphone at Pushka. “Pushka, you say what?”

“Huh?”

“Pushka!”

“Well,” Pushka said. “I guess I’ll say that I like working for the Groundhog.”

“No, but what specifically,” the Fan Man said. “‘I like the Groundhog, because…’”

“I like the Groundhog because…” The ensuing two minutes were silent enough for Vladimir to hear the masculine beating of his new Rolex. “I like him because…Because he is merciful,” Pushka finally said to everyone’s relief.

“Good. Now state an example.”

Pushka pulled at his moustache and turned to Melashvili who nodded in encouragement. “An example. State an example. Let me think. Well, I’ll give you an example. Back in eighty-nine my brother set up a little black-market currency exchange by the Arbat in Moscow, knowing full well that the Groundhog had already claimed that territory as his own…”

“Oh, no!” several voices said. “God help him!”

“Right, you’re expecting the worst,” said Pushka, his tone getting stronger as he reached the moral of the story. “But the Groundhog didn’t kill him. He could have, but all he did was take his wife. Which was fine, because everyone took his wife. She was that kind of a wife. And so—”

“And so he taught him a lesson without resorting to violence,” Melashvili filled in quickly. “You’ve proved your point: The Groundhog is merciful.”

“Yes,” the Georgians muttered. “The Groundhog is merciful.”

“Very good!” Mr. Rybakov said. “That was a good example and well told. Bravo, Pushka. Now let’s continue going around the table. Daushvili, you say what?”

“I’ll say…” The big man looked Vladimir over, curling a mangy eyebrow until it reminded Vladimir of a sea horse resting on its side, something he had once seen in an aquarium or perhaps only in a dream.

“I like the Groundhog because…” Rybakov prompted him.

“I like the Groundhog because… Because he holds no prejudice against the southern nationalities,” Daushvili said. “Sure, sometimes he’ll call me a Georgian black-ass, but only when he needs to put me in my place or when he’s in one of his lighter moods. As for persons of the Hebrew race, like our esteemed guest Vladimir Borisovich here, I’d say the Groundhog is positively awed by them. ‘Three Yids,’ he’s always saying. ‘All you need is three Yids to rule the world…’”

“Which brings us to the most important point about the Groundhog,” Melashvili interrupted. “The Groundhog is a modern businessman. If the marketplace doesn’t tolerate prejudice, why should the Groundhog? He needs the best and brightest on his side no matter what shade their ass. And if Vladimir can tame America’s immigration police and get Mr. Rybakov his citizenship, well, who can tell how far the Groundhog will take him… Or where eventually he will land.”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, toying with the clasp of his sparkling Rolex. “Who can tell.” He realized that this was one of the first things he had said during the entire interview, or get-to-know-you session, or whatever this was. The others must have noticed this as well, for they looked at Vladimir expectantly. But what more could he say? He had been delighted just to listen to them.

Vladimir finally broke the silence. “Is there any butter?” he asked. “I like a little butter on my caviar sandwich. That’s how my mother, the esteemed Yelena Petrovna, used to make it for me when I was just a boy.”

A fresh stick of butter was produced. Melashvili gently unwrapped it himself. Several crewmembers helped Vladimir spread it on black bread.

Soon they would toast Mother’s health.

13. THE SEARCH FOR MONEY IN WESTCHESTER

DR. GIRSHKIN COUNTED off eight hundred dollars in fresh twenties, wetting his fingertips between each and every bill. “It’s better that you come to me with your sad money troubles,” he said to Vladimir, “than get some damn credit card…”

His fingers shaking with money-lust, Vladimir counted his father’s gift. He whispered the mounting dollar amounts in Russian, the language of longing, of homeland and Mother, his money-counting language: “Vosem’desyat dollarov… Sto dollarov… Sto dvadtsat’ dollarov…” Dr. Girshkin, too, whispered along, so that to Western ears father and son might have been caught in the act of solemn prayer.

Afterward, Vladimir was charmed by how his father neatly arranged a backyard table with napkins and cutlery, as if he was a guru past his prime, receiving one of the few visitors who still bothered to ascend his mountaintop. His father removed a recent Polaroid from the fridge door showing a smiling Dr. Girshkin holding a tremendous glossy-black flounder with the hook still embedded in one fatty lip, and placed it on Vladimir’s plate by means of introduction. The fish itself broiled away in the kitchen.

“Now, tell me about this new woman,” said his father, taking off his pants, which he did whenever his wife was off the premises. “She’s better than Challatchka?”

“One should not even compare,” Vladimir said, watching Grandmother wheel herself toward the table then spin around midyard to mind her defenseless oak trees.

“Then will you make a home with her?” his father asked. “No, I think not,” he answered the question himself. “It’s never too wise to settle down with any one woman so early in life. You know, when I was a young student at Leningrad State, I had my own apartment on the embankment of the River Moika, a prime spot for lechery. And so, at all times of the day, women fellow-students would make their way across the Palace Bridge to spend some time with your father. I was well known, a popular Jew.” He looked up to the heavens dimming above, as if his past life continued in some parallel universe.

“But the best, I’ll tell you, was when we were sent to work the collective farms during summer breaks. We were all put in freight cars, the women and men in the same cars, mind you! It took three or four days to get to the farms and so the pissing and the shitting was done right out the freight doors. You would be sitting, talking with your chums, when all of a sudden, to your left, a beautiful, round bottom would come out to do the most intimate of business. And some of these women were big and blond, you know, the Slavs! Not that there’s anything wrong with our own Jewish types, but, oh, when you found these women all alone in the middle of a hayfield and you’d say, ‘Excuse me, I would like to make your acquaintance, comrade so-and-so!’ You’d both be sweaty and shitty and drunk, but the fresh young sex out in the fields was sublime.”

He jumped up suddenly and said, “Flounder,” then rushed off to the kitchen. Vladimir chewed on the heel of the bread loaf and helped himself to vodka. He waved to Grandma, who shouted back something indecipherable and, using both of her frail arms, attempted to return the wave.

His father emerged with a sizzling pan and tossed mangled bits of flounder onto both of their plates; the art of filleting had never found favor with the doctor. “So what’s the money for?” asked his father. “You must buy this woman little gifts, the garbage women like?”

“No, it’s not that,” Vladimir said. “She enjoys having a good time. She doesn’t expect me to pay for her, but I have to pay for myself at least.” He neglected to mention that he had been adopted by the Ruoccos. One family at a time.

“I don’t know about this one,” Dr. Girshkin said, stuffing his face with fish and stir-fried cabbage. “Challatchka was so nice and quiet. You could survive on your pauper’s salary with her. But maybe this one will make you reconsider your priorities. I’m sure you know you have the smarts to make a lot of money in this country. And through honest work, not like…”

“I consider what you do honest work,” said Vladimir, who at one point in Hebrew school had had a long argument with himself concerning the morality of his father’s medical enterprise. The argument had been decided in his father’s favor, although the reasoning was laced with Talmudisms intricate enough for Vladimir to lose track of in subsequent reenactments. Something about stealing a rich neighbor’s cow, then charging him retail for the steaks.

“Honest, well,” his father said. “Look what happened to poor Shurik.”

“Oh?” Vladimir withdrew a long fish bone embedded between two molars. He remembered Uncle Shurik coarsely reprimanding Vladimir as a child for using the informal address (ty as opposed to vy) when chatting up Shurik’s fat Odessa wife. “What’s new with Shurik?”

“I don’t know the particulars, and I don’t want to know, personally, but they had a search warrant for his offices and everything.” His father shuddered visibly, then put his hands together as a calming measure. He poured himself a mug of vodka and took a swig. “They say Shurik specialized in pyramid schemes. Know what those are, Volodya?”

Vladimir shook his head.

“Sometimes it shocks me how little you know about anything. Pyramid schemes, also known as Ponzi schemes, after one Carlo Ponzi. In the 1920s, this guy Ponzi, a little immigrant from Parma, comes to this fat land of ours with some bright ideas. He sets up a little investment club, takes money from greedy idiots, promises them impossibly huge returns, pays them off for a while by stealing from the next round of idiots, and then he screws everybody. Can you imagine it?”

Actually, Vladimir could. A pyramid scheme! Something for nothing. It sounded like a neat idea. How exciting to think his relatives were so gainfully employed. Perhaps they knew Mr. Melashvili and his seafaring Georgians.

“Shurik’s going to get some good lawyers, I’m certain. Real American lawyers. But your mother is afraid that some of his files will lead to me, which is really science fiction when you think about it. As it stands, it would take some extraordinary sleuth work and a raft of self-incriminating patients to drag me into jail.” His father laughed then coughed fiercely to expel a small bone that had strayed too far into his throat.

Vladimir pretended to busy himself with his flounder. His father had never talked with such candor about his dealings, although nothing was ever hidden from Vladimir. Especially since Mother had always gloated about how she, with only the abysmal education of a Soviet kindergarten teacher, had risen to such corporate prominence legally, while poor, stupid Father had to spend his days defrauding America’s paradoxical health care system.

“But as for you, son, my advice is: you do what you want to do. That’s my final pronouncement. Look at me. I never cared about medicine, about saving or prolonging the lives of my patients, not that I’m such a bad person. I care about other things: fishing, gardening, the opera. The only medical fascination I ever had was on those freight trains with the women. Then your grandmother said to me: become a doctor, you’re smart, you’ll do well. Well, it certainly turned out to be a lucrative profession in America, the way we practice it here, anyway.” He swung his arm around to indicate he meant Fortress Girshkin with the little doctor’s shingle blowing in the breeze underneath a fake antique lamp.

Vladimir’s father finished off his mug and reached for a vodka refill. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Please do what you want to do with your life. What do you want to do, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” Vladimir said. “Maybe I want to teach.” Teach? Where the hell did that come from?

“Teaching, now that’s a strange kind of profession,” said his father. “There are some very unexceptional people out there teaching. And what if they send you to teach those kids in Harlem? Or the Bronx? Or Brooklyn? Or Queens? They’d tear you apart, those little animals. I was thinking, are you good with computers at all? Oh, but listen to me. Now I’m telling you what you should do. No, let’s drink to your happy but impractical pedagogic dreams.”

“And to Grandmother’s health,” Vladimir said.

“Yes, to that crazy old woman.” Dr. Girshkin finished the contents of his mug, then squeezed his mustache for stray drops of the familiar liquid. He sighed, breathing out the firewater. “You know, Vladimir, you and your grandmother are really all I have to live for in the world, well, as far as any man has to live for other people—what is it they say?—no man is an island. Your mother, nu, I picture she’ll be here with me till the end. We are like one of those many unfortunate corporate mergers they’ve had in the past decade; we are like Yugoslavia. But if I had to answer the question, who would I die for, if there was, say, a plane hijacking and the hijackers said that one of us had to be killed, well, I’d die for you or Grandmother without thinking twice.”

Vladimir wiggled his toes in the tight childhood slippers (made of a resilient moleskin that lent itself to a frisky, animal foot odor) that his parents had saved and forced him to wear during visits. “Why would you die for Grandmother?” he asked. “She’s older.”

“It’s a good question,” said Vladimir’s father and concentrated on it for a spell while chewing on the flabby underhang of his thumb. It was clear to Vladimir that his father had thought out this hijacking scenario many times. “I would say conclusively that I do not have all that much to live for in my life. I don’t mean to sound especially sad but I’m sure many men my age would come to that conclusion. I think the only reason that I would not give up my life in exchange for Grandma’s is to be a father to you, but it seems to me that you really haven’t needed me as a father for some time now. You have a life that’s so far removed from this house, which we worked so hard, your mother and I, to put together, that sometimes… well, I wonder what the point was.”

Vladimir considered his new life with the Ruoccos. How far he had come. Yes. What was the point of all that hard work? “Well, I hope we never all get hijacked,” he said, moving aside his plate with the fragmented fish skeleton and wiping his dry brow with a napkin.

“I hope so too,” Vladimir’s father said, although his son remained unconvinced. If not in his professional or family life, then at least by dying at the hands of those reprehensible hijackers with the handlebar mustaches, Dr. Girshkin would be meted out a slice of dignity for all the world to see.

“So remember what we talked about today,” said his father. “The most important thing: you do what you want to do. And also, don’t get married unless you are ready to lose your happy youth. These are the two lessons we’ve learned today.”

Vladimir’s father got up, balancing himself against the plastic lawn table. He shook his bad leg (it had fallen asleep during dinner), then looked back to make sure Grandmother was all right as she wheeled herself about the Girshkin gardens. Having satisfied himself of his mother’s well-being, Dr. Girshkin limped back into the kitchen to fetch tea and cake, leaving Vladimir to hope that his father had said everything he wanted to say to him.

But he hadn’t.

AN HOUR LATER, his cheeks burning from his father’s kisses, Vladimir was conveyed from village to city by the 8:12 P.M. Metro-North local train. If his peripheral vision was correct, he could have sworn he saw the flash of Mother’s amber brooch, a cheap Baltic treasure, in a train carriage headed in the opposite direction. Soon she would be back in the house, half-asleep on the couch, quietly enumerating for her husband the ignominies suffered during her fourteen-hour work day, the whisperings of American underlings behind her back, the mysterious cabals in the men’s room that were surely the signs of a native rebellion, a corporate coup d’etat. They always wanted more, the native-born. More money. Better health coverage. Endless two-week vacations. This is what happened when parents didn’t set limits for their children, when one was born into a boundless world.

“Please, porcupine, your troglodyte workers are scared to death of you,” the doctor would reassure his wife, as he brought her little dishes of eggplant caviar and whitefish salad, a cup of herbal tea to soothe her nerves. He would prop a pillow under her feet and tune the television to the show they both loved—the one where felonious movie stars were exposed for who they really were.

MEANWHILE, IN HER upstairs bedroom, Grandmother would be dreaming of a lone oak tree hulking over a garden of milkweed and evening primrose, and in the shade of the oak tree that bow-legged goy from the village regiment, a shiny red star on his army cap, would look up from his kasha bowl and smile his abundant country smile for her. Suddenly, they would be dancing a mazurka in some big-city palace of culture, and he would press her against his chest and kiss her lips, first chastely then not… Because here in the hermitage of Grandmother’s dreams, among the wispy force fields of desire and history floating over the American suburbs, the kindly Sergeant Yasha finally loved her and there was enough happiness for all.

Downstairs, Dr. Girshkin was still awake. He examined his wife fast asleep on the couch, considered the difficulty of transporting her up to her bedroom, and, shaking his head in regret, retired to his basement abode.

In the basement, surrounded by plaster dust and loose electrical wires, the doctor had tried to recreate for himself the rickety village izba where he had spent his childhood: coarse off-white panels lining the walls were supposed to bring to mind the Russian birch; a set of unfinished wooden chairs gathered around a three-legged kitchen table bespoke an admirable poverty. On this table, there was some Pushkin, a little Lermontov, and, for some reason, a wayward copy of the New England Medical Journal, which the doctor quickly shunted under his bed. The great warm stove, the centerpiece of his youth, was missing from the ensemble, but what could one do?

The doctor turned on a fan, undressed, ate a conveniently placed piece of cheese, and put himself to bed. I will dream of the well-being of my son, he said to himself. But, alas, the dream would not come. There was something holding him back, an ugly impression from the little dinner party he had had with Vladimir. What was it? He had spoken of the great themes—the futility of love, the ephemeral nature of youth. But he had babbled on about nothing, really! All that verbosity, Russian melancholy, and nostalgia were for naught. As always, he had missed the point. He should have said… Let’s see. Well, to start, he should have told Vladimir that he was tired. Just in those words: “Vladimir, I am tired.” Yes that’s what he should have said. Dr. Girshkin yawned as if to emphasize his tiredness.

And why am I tired, Vladimir? Well, if you must ask, I will answer. I am tired because emigrating to this country, leaving one’s hut, one’s yurt, one’s Soviet-era high-rise requires an ambition, a madness, a stubbornness, a stamina that I have never had.

Ach. Dr. Girshkin rearranged his moist sheets and propped his pillow this way and that. No, that sounded too pathetic, too defeatist. Instead, he should have been more theoretical about the whole matter. “You see, Volodya,” he should have said, “the Old World is populated by two breeds of peasants, the alpha peasant and the beta peasant. Now the alpha peasant, she feels the dry soil crack beneath her feet and quickly packs her family’s bags for the New World, while the beta peasant, poor fellow with his weak, sentimental heart, stays put and tills the desperate land. Your mother? Well, as you might have guessed, she’s the alpha peasant of our family, a force unswerving, impenetrable, inexorable. Do you follow me, Volodya?

“Good! Because let me tell you this: Contrary to your mother’s refugee charter, it’s all right to be less than your neighbor, to be a beta immigrant here in America where alpha immigrants are the rule. It’s all right to let stronger people take responsibility for your life, to let them drag you to a better place, show you how it’s done. Because, ultimately, my son, making compromises may be a necessity, but it’s the constant weighing and reweighing of these compromises that becomes an illness.”

Dr. Girshkin quivered with happiness at his insight. “An illness.” Right! Or, perhaps, “a madness.” That was better still.

He thought of ways he could share this information with Vladimir—maybe he could tempt him back to Scarsdale with the promise of more money, or they could plan an excursion to the city’s famous Metropolitan Museum (their Near Eastern collections were quite impressive). Yes, a museum. The perfect location for imparting important lessons.

Dr. Girshkin finally drifted off to sleep, dreaming of father and son astride a winged Assyrian lion, soaring over the aerials and prickly spires of this unlovely land. The doctor couldn’t imagine where the ancient beast was taking them, but, in the end, after a long full day of suffering, it was nice to simply take to the air.

14. THE SEARCH FOR MONEY DOWNTOWN

THE NEXT MORNING in Manhattan, Vladimir shook off the shackles of slumber, vigorously brushed his teeth, took a long cathartic shower, and counted the goods: he had $800.00 from his father plus the $500.00 from Rybakov plus the still unsold Rolex and ten thousand Dunhill cigarettes. “A good start,” Vladimir said to Francesca’s sleeping form, “but I resolve to do better.” And with that Gatsbyesque mantra on his lips, he set off once again for the jolly workaday world of the Emma Lazarus Society. He had barely made it through the reception area when Zbigniew, the Acculturation Czar, leapt out of the processing room and ambushed him. “Girshkin,” he said. “It’s here.”

“Good God! What’s here?”

“Your idiot countryman with the fan. Rybakov. His FOIA is here.”

“Foh-yah?”

“Freedom of Information Act. O moi boze! How long have you been working here, Girshkin?” Zbigniew grabbed his employee’s shirtsleeve and dragged him to his lair, the office of the chief acculturator. Here, Lech Wal^⁄esa waved to adoring dock workers from one wall, John Paul II smiled weakly from beneath his scepter, and taking center stage was the framed jacket cover of Zbigniew’s vanity-press masterpiece Pole to Pole: A Father & Son’s Journey to the Heart of Polonia.

“He got as far as the citizenship ceremony,” Zbigniew rasped happily, waving the government file at him. Vladimir had caught him right after lunch—the most satisfactory, almost postcoital part of the Acculturation Czar’s sad little day.

“That far.”

“Picture for yourself a little scenario. Rybakov is taking the oath, he is at the part where you have to swear to defend the country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and, well… I suppose he takes this the wrong way or, more likely, he is drunk, because he spontaneously starts beating Mr. Jamal Bin Rashid of Kew Gardens, Queens. Beats him with both his crutches, it says here, while shouting racial no-nos.”

“I see.”

“Mr. Rashid is talked out of pressing charges, but—”

“The citizenship.”

“Yes.”

“Well, can’t we do something?” said Vladimir. “I mean the man is a documented loon, surely there are exceptions for the mentally ill.”

“What can we do for him? We could put him in a home where he won’t hurt anybody. We can close down the visa section in Moscow so you Russian bastards stay home.”

Yes, of course. “Thank you, Pan Direktor,” Vladimir said, retreating to the unkempt comfort of his own desk. He rested his head against the desk’s cool and unforgiving metal. This wasn’t good news at all.

He had wanted Rybakov to get his citizenship.

He had wanted more goods and services out of the Georgians.

He had wanted to visit the Groundhog in Prava to extract some gifts from him personally.

At least there was the nightly dinner with the Ruoccos. Was it bouillabaisse night already? Wait, let’s see…Monday—polenta, Tuesday—gnocchi… What came after Tuesday? According to the appointment book, a night with an anachronistic buffoon. A former best friend.

YES, IT WAS Baobab Night. After ignoring Baobab’s phone calls for nearly two months, Vladimir felt an ache in his heart, a subtle reminder of his tonkost, the Russian word signifying empathy, quiet compassion, a generosity of spirit.

No, that’s not true. It was the money, of course. Bao had ways of making it, desperate ways.

The Carcass was celebrating its Modern Music Week. On this particular outing, the band and its audience had bridged the gap between artist and patron: both were dressed in accordance with the same flannel-and-boots look that was starting to seep out of the nation’s unplugged Northwestern corner. Seattle. Portland, Oregon. Something or someone named Eugene. This was a worrisome development for Vladimir who did not want to wear flannels or boots, certainly not in the summer. He tugged nervously at his ample Cuban shirt. He would have to discuss this with Fran.

Meanwhile, Baobab was giving life to the “grinning from ear to ear” cliché; his entire face, even the thick nose bent at several junctures, was somehow caught up in the act of smiling. The sad thing was that it was Vladimir (just standing there drinking his beer) who provoked all this mirth in lonely Baobab.

Vladimir was reminded of their high school days: Vladimir and Baobab taking the Metro-North Railroad home from the math-and-science high school after a long day of subtle rejections by young women and men alike, discussing better ways to lodge their suburban selves into Manhattan’s starry firmament. Wasn’t this the same Baobab he once loved?

“Yup, Roberta’s still sleeping with Laszlo,” Baobab began his update, “but now I think Laszlo wants to sleep with me, too. It’ll be a nice way to bring us all together. And I’m drawing up an outline for my own system of thought. Oh, and I think I’ve finally found a major to call my own: Humor Studies.”

“But you’re not very funny,” Vladimir said.

“Real humor is not supposed to be funny,” Baobab said. “It’s supposed to be tragic, like the Marx Brothers. And I’ve found a great professor, Joseph Ruocco. Have you heard of him? He’s going to be my advisor. He’s both funny and sad. And I’m staying in New York, pal. I’m not joining this whole exodus to Prava, the fucking Paris of the 90s. That shit’ll be over in six months, I predict. No, I’m sticking with this Ruocco guy. I’m sticking with reality.”

“Baobab, I need money,” Vladimir changed the subject.

He gave an overview of his problems in a Baobabian way.

“It certainly sounds like the class struggle to me,” Baobab agreed. “Why don’t you just tell this Frannie how poor you are? It’s not shameful. Look at you… You have the bearing of an emancipated serf. Some women find that sexy.”

“Baobab, have you been listening? I’m not going to ask her for a handout.”

“All right,” Baobab said. “Can I talk simply?”

“Please,” Vladimir said. “I’m a face-value kind of guy. I read headlines and weep.”

“Okay, simply put, then. Jordi, my boss, is a very nice guy. Do you take my word for it?”

“No drugs.”

“He’s got a son, twenty years old. An idiot. A nullity. Wants to go to this huge private college near Miami. Yale it’s not, but they still have a selection process of sorts. Jordi paid some Indian to take the kid’s college boards. The Hindustani did really well, which doesn’t really explain how it took the kid six years to finish high school. The college wants to interview the kid. So we’ve got to send someone down who could talk impressively.”

“You?”

“That was our thinking. But, as you can see, I’m white as a sheet. You got that olive-skinned thing going, and with that facial hair you look like a young Yasir Arafat.”

“But I’m not quite… Jordi’s what… Spanish?”

“Don’t ever call him Spanish. Jordi’s fiercely Catalan.”

“And what happens when the kid shows up next year? Or do I have to go to college for him too?”

“The place is so gargantuan the interviewer will never see this kid again. Trust me, it’s foolproof, and I don’t even think it’s terribly illegal. Impersonating a high school kid: not exactly the crime of the century, just a lame thing do. But for twenty thousand…”

“How now?” Vladimir said. Two sets of numbers floated through the stale downtown air. They didn’t resolve themselves immediately, but it was clear that $20,000, when subtracted from the needed $32,200, left a fairly workable sum. “How much money?”

Baobab put his wet palms on Vladimir’s little shoulders and shook him. He pulled down Vladimir’s snap-brim until it was tight enough to hurt. He breathed his sour breath all over Vladimir and smacked his face, only half good-naturedly. His nose was getting even fleshier and he was looking and perspiring like a man twice his age and with a heart condition too. “You better start valuing our friendship,” he said. And then he added something straight out of Girshkinland, or perhaps straight out of any familial relationship: “You fall in love with a woman, you fall out of love with a woman, but your best friend Baobab is always there, even if he’s not always the most attractive guy to have around. You just never know when you’re going to need old Baobab.”

“Thank you,” Vladimir said. “Thank you for that.”

15. THE SEARCH FOR MONEY IN FLORIDA

A PEACH CADILLAC.

Vladimir had never seen one before, but he knew these vehicles once played an important part in the cultural development of the United States. This particular peach Caddy was idling by the curb of the Miami International Airport and belonged to a man who, along with most Mongolians and Indonesians, went by only one name; in this case, Jordi.

Jordi had amiably carried Vladimir’s enormous duffel bag stuffed with collegiate attire through the airport maze and was remarking on how Vladimir had had the good sense to come prepared, though he would have gladly taken Vladimir shopping for a tweed jacket and rep tie. “That’s what I like about you immigruns,” he was saying. “You’re not spoiled. You work hard. You sweat rivers. My father was an immigrun, you know? He built up our family’s business with his own hands.”

Built up his business? With his own hands? No, Jordi neither sounded nor resembled the drug dealer out of central casting, which Vladimir was expecting with some dread. He wasn’t even Picasso-looking, which, Vladimir imagined, was the semblance to which all Catalan people aspired. He looked like a middle-aged Jew with a textile business. Middle-aged but closer to retirement than the glory days: his wide face burrowed with the wrinkles of over-tanning; his gait was brisk and yet he took the time to swagger in his glowing ostrich-skin loafers like a man with accomplishments behind him. “I have often dreamed of visiting Spain,” Vladimir told him.

“Si ma mare fos Espanya jo seria un fill de puta,” Jordi said. “Do you know what that means? ‘If my mother was Spain I’d be a son of a bitch.’ That’s what I think of the Spanish. White spics, that’s all.”

“I would only visit Barcelona,” Vladimir assured the Catalonian.

“Eh, the rest of Catalunya ain’t bad either. I fucked some little lady in Tartosa once. She was like some kind of dwarf.”

“Small women can be nice,” Vladimir said. He wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular.

“We’ll have to take off the goatee,” Jordi said, once they were in the chilled car. “You look too old with the goatee. We’re sending the kid to college, not to law school. Law school comes later.”

What a coincidence: Jordi and Mother had similar plans for their progeny. Perhaps an introduction was in order. But how terrible that Vladimir would lose his prized goatee, which made him look five years older and ten years wiser. Fortunately, the very same hormones that were skimming off the top of his head were already sprouting hair efficiently most places below. And then there was the matter of the twenty thousand dollars. “I’ll shave right away,” Vladimir said.

“Good boy,” Jordi said, reaching over to squeeze Vladimir’s shoulder. His hands smelled like baby powder; the rest of his smell, as circulated by the gale-force air-conditioning, consisted of nine parts citrus-based cologne, one part male. “There’s some soda in the cooler if you want,” he said. He had that quaint working-class Queens pronunciation which turned “soda” into “soder,” “tuna” into “tuner,” and the U.S. into a mythopoetic land called “Ameriker.”

Around them swirled the blightscape of motels with German and Canadian flags, crappy chain restaurants with electrified cows and lobster tails, and, of course, the ubiquitous palms, those dear old friends of the temperate Northeasterner. “This is a nice car,” Vladimir said, by way of conversation.

“It’s a little too niggered up, don’t you think? Tinted windows, oversized tires…”

Ah, a little racism before lunch. Time to put your progressive instincts to work, Vladimir. The Girshkins spent a hundred thousand dollars a year on your four-year socialist powwow in the Midwest. Don’t let the alma mater down. “Mr. Jordi, why do you think people of color prefer tinted windows and the like? I mean, if that really is the case.”

“Because they’re monkeys.”

“I see.”

“But take a peach Caddy without the tinted windows and the fat tires, and you got yourself a classy car, correct? I’ll tell you something: I rent four hundred of these a year. Everyone who works for me—New York, Miami, Côte d’Azur—everyone’s got a peach Caddy. Don’t like my style, work for someone else, barrada. Pendejo. Subject closed.”

Meanwhile, the trashy motels of the north were giving way to the dignified Art-Deco facades of South Beach, and Jordi told Vladimir to keep a lookout for the New Eden Hotel & Cabana, which Vladimir remembered from his past journeys through South Beach as a tall, somewhat crumbling resort next to the modernistic loop of the Fountainebleau Hilton, the flagship of the mink-stole era.

The New Eden’s vertical, once-opulent lobby was built around a meticulously scrubbed chandelier careening several stories down to a circular arrangement of fraying velvet recliners. “Elegance never goes out of style,” Jordi said. “Hey, look at all these good folks!” He waved to a gaggle of retirees with such gusto that Vladimir assumed they had all come from the old country together. But, to Jordi’s disappointment, there was hardly a stir from the New Eden gang, its members enjoying a splendid afternoon’s torpor. For those awake, Bunny Berrigan was playing over the speakers, vegetarian liver was being served in the Green Room—too many distractions to notice the arrival of Jordi and Vladimir, an unusual duo by anyone’s standards.

Jordi returned from the reservations desk with some further bad news: “My secretary screwed up our reservations, the cow,” he said. “Would you mind splitting a room with me, Vladimir?”

“Not at all,” Vladimir said. “It’ll be like a slumber party.”

“Slumber party. I like that. That’s a good way to put it. Why do little girls get to have all the fun?” Why? There was a very good reason why little girls, and only little girls, got to have all the fun at slumber parties. But Vladimir was going to have to find out for himself.

VLADIMIR PUT DOWN Jordi’s grimy little electric shaver and looked at various angles of his scrubbed and itching face in the bathroom’s three-sectional mirror. What a disaster. The sickly Vladimir of Leningrad looked back at him, then the scared Vladimir of Hebrew school, and finally the confused Vladimir of the math-and-science high school: a triptych of his entire lusterless career as a youngster. What a difference a little merkin-like hair made around his thick lips.

“Well?” Vladimir stepped out into the sunlit bedroom smothered in an endless assortment of floral patterns and wood, a New England bed-and-breakfast motif strayed way past the Mason-Dixon Line. Jordi looked up from his paper. He had sprawled out on one of the matching beds, dressed only in his swimming trunks. His body was loosely organized like a booming sunbelt city, suburban rivulets of fat spilling out in all directions.

“All of a sudden an attractive young man appears before me,” he said. “What a difference a little shave makes.”

“Is the interview tomorrow?”

“Hm?” Jordi was still appraising Vladimir’s virgin face. “That’s right. We’ll go over what you have to say. But later. Now go out and play in the sun, tan your chin so that it don’t stick out. And help yourself to some of this expensive champagne. You won’t believe how much it costs.”

Vladimir took the elevator down to the exit marked “cabana and pool.” Outside, one could see why the deck chairs were empty and the beefy cabana boys loafing: Florida off-season in three-digit temperatures was a scary proposition.

Despite the misery, Vladimir toasted this stretch of coast with his champagne flute. He said, “Vashe zdorovye,” to the seagulls screeching above. The whole setup felt like home to Vladimir. In his youth, the Girshkins used to descend on the pebbly beaches of Yalta each summer. Dr. Girshkin had prescribed a daily dose of sun for the ailing Vladimir. Mother would park him for hours beneath that blinding yellow orb to sweat and cough up phlegm.

He was not allowed to play with other children (his grandmother had branded them spies and informants), nor was he allowed a dip in the Black Sea, as Mother feared that a ravenous dolphin would eat him (several bottlenosed specimens could be seen disporting along the coast).

Instead, she had devised a game for them to play. It was called Hard Currency. Each morning Mother would have tea with an old friend of hers who happened to be a clerk at the Intourist Hotel for Foreigners and would brief Mother on the latest exchange rates. Then she and Vladimir would memorize the figures. They would start: “Seven British pound sterling equals…”

“Thirteen dollars American,” cried Vladimir.

“Twenty-five Dutch guilders.”

“Forty-three Swiss francs!”

“Thirty-nine Finnish markka.”

“Twenty-five Deutsche marks!”

“Thirty-one Swedish krona.”

“Sixty… Sixty-three… Nor wegian…”

“Wrong, my little dope…”

The penalty for failure (and the reward for success) was a paltry Soviet kopek, but one day Vladimir managed to rack up an entire five-kopek coin, which Mother sadly fished out of her purse. “Now you can afford a Metro ride,” she said. “Now you will get on the Metro and leave me forever.”

Vladimir was so shocked by this pronouncement that he started to cry. “How can I leave you, Mamatchka?” he whimpered. “Where will I take the Metro all by myself? No, I will never ride the Metro again!” He cried all afternoon, suntan lotion dribbling down his cheeks. Not even a masterly display of acrobatics on the part of the man-eating dolphins could cheer him.

Ah, childhood and its discontents. Feeling much older and happier, Vladimir decided to mail Fran a postcard. The New Eden gift shop had an impressive selection of naked rumps dusted with sand, the manatee begging to be saved from extinction, and close-ups of plastic pink flamingoes roosting in Floridian front yards. Vladimir settled on the last of these as being perfectly representative. “My dear,” he wrote on the back. “The immigrant-resettlement conference bores me to no end. How I hate my work sometimes.” The conference had been a stroke of genius on his part. He even told Fran he was presenting a lecture based on his mother: “The Pierogi Prerogative: Soviet Jews and the Co-optation of the American Marketplace.”

“I practice shuffleboard and mah-jongg whenever I can,” he wrote to Fran, “just to get a leg up on you in time for our golden years. But before you don your babushka and I slip into a nice pair of bright-white slacks, let us, sometime soon, travel across this entire nation, and you can fill me in on your life from day one. We could be like tourists (i.e., bring a camera, look a certain way). I don’t know how to drive, but am willing to learn. Can’t wait to see you in three days and four hours.”

He posted the card, then paid a visit to the Eden Roc bar, where he was duly interrogated about his age before the barkeep finally caved in on account of his receding hairline and gave him a lousy beer. That hairless chin of his, jutting out like a little boiled egg, was already becoming a liability. Two beers later, he decided to face up to his one other New York responsibility, this one a matter of duty not pleasure.

An irritated Mr. Rybakov came on the line immediately: “Who? Devil confound it. Which hemisphere is this?”

“Rybakov, it’s Girshkin. Did I wake you?”

“I don’t need sleep, commandant.”

“You never told me you hit Mr. Rashid during the naturalization ceremony.”

“What? Oh, but I’m in the clear on that one. My God, he was a foreigner! My English is not so good, but I know what the judge told me: ‘To protecting country… against foreigner and domestic enemy… I am swearing…’ Then I look to my left and what do I see? An Egyptian like the one at the newsstand who always overcharges me five cents for the Russian paper. Another foreigner trying to defraud the workers and the peasant masses and convert us to his Islam, that lousy Turk! So I did what the judge told to do: I defended my country. You don’t give an order to a soldier and expect him to disobey. That’s mutiny!”

“Well, you’ve certainly put me in an awkward position,” Vladimir said. “I’m down here in Florida right now, playing tennis with the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, begging him to reconsider your case. It’s forty degrees Celsius here and I’m about to have a myocardial infarction. Do you hear me, Rybakov? An infarction.”

“Oi, Volodechka, please, please get me into that hall for the ceremonies again. I’ll behave this time. Tell the director to forgive me that one incident. Tell him that I’m not all well up here.” Nine hundred miles up the coast, Rybakov was surely tapping away at his forehead.

Vladimir sighed the deep sigh of a father coming to terms with his offspring’s limitations. “Fine, I’ll call you once I get into the city. Practice being civil in front of the mirror.”

“Captain, I am following your directives without question! All power to the Immigration and Naturalization Service!”

JORDI LAY ON his stomach, watching a show about a modeling agency, grunting along as the feeble bon mots flew and negligees slithered to the ground. The remains of his early dinner and two empty champagne bottles were lined up on a little table intended for card games or the like; an additional champagne bottle was afloat in a bucket of melted ice. It was possible to imagine a silver tray from the Lusitania bearing a hastily scribbled champagne bill floating in to join this hedonism in disrepair.

“I like the brunettes,” said Vladimir, sitting down on his bed, shaking sand out of his sneakers.

“Brunettes are tighter than blondes,” Jordi posited. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, beaming with pride at this admission and feeling even younger than his clean-shaven face.

“What color hair?”

For some reason Vladimir thought of Challah’s reddish curls, but then he caught himself and answered correctly: “Dark, very dark.”

“And how does she take it?” Jordi wanted to know. With sugar or with milk, was that the question?

“She takes it well,” he said.

“I mean how does she… Oh, just drink, boy. You have to be as drunk as me to be my friend!”

Vladimir did as he was told, then asked about Jordi’s son, that big imbecile.

“Ah, little Jaume.” The proud papa sat up and slapped his haunches, businesslike. He turned down the volume on the television, until the models’ squealing was down to the whisper of the waves brushing against the sand outside. “He’s a bright kid, he just can’t do well in a school environment. So maybe you shouldn’t talk like you’re too book-smart, but mention a couple of books if you can. Now, he’s into football although they kicked him off the team last year.” This uninspiring fact seemed to bring about a little reverie on Jordi’s part. “But I blame the coach, the school, and the Board of Ed for not understanding my boy’s needs,” he said at last. “So here’s to my little Jaume, attorney-at-law. With God’s help, of course.” He gulped down most of a champagne bottle in ten incredibly well-spaced swallows, as if a coxswain was coaching him along.

“This is important information,” Vladimir said. “I don’t know much about sports. For instance, what’s the name of the team here?”

“Oh, boy. You Manhattan kids can be a bunch of queers sometimes. Here they’re called the Dolphins, and back home we’ve got two teams: the Giants and the Jets.”

“I’ve heard of those,” Vladimir said. Could those teams have had any more insipid names? If Vladimir were ever to own a franchise he’d call it something like the New York Yiddels. The Brighton Beach Refu-Jews.

Jordi dictated additional trivia about the Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys, and the mythical cow-women who attended to them, while room service brought up a swordfish, unbearably bland despite the hail of black pepper beneath which it suffocated. Vladimir munched on this mediocrity as Jordi began enumerating his son’s finer points: for instance, he never hit his girlfriend even when circumstances demanded it; and he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that money didn’t grow on trees, that hard work never killed anybody, that without pain there was no gain. Vladimir worked with these commendable attributes, then suggested some more tangible activities for little Jaume: the boy spent his free time running the Catalan Culture Club at school; he helped old Polish ladies get to their weekly deviled ham at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul; he wrote letters to his local congressperson demanding better lighting for the local softball field (see interest in sports above).

“Here’s to little Jaume looking out for old Polack broads,” Jordi said. “And why aren’t you drinking, sweetheart?”

Vladimir pointed to his bladder then went to the rosy bathroom to relieve himself. When he came out, two representatives of room service—young, pimpled Adam and Eve of the South—were waiting to present him with another bow-tied bottle. “On the house, sir.”

The sun had long since disappeared when Vladimir felt the full giddy nausea of champagne drunkenness and ordered himself to stop. He sat down hard on his bed near the balcony and felt it sway a little in all four directions. Something was askew, and it wasn’t just the physical universe reeling from booze. The idea of appearing in front of a college admissions officer, of impersonating a dullard’s son, suddenly seemed as easy as hunting cows. Yes, an entire alternate moral universe was opening up before Vladimir, an alternate Americana populated with fellow beta immigrants living easy and drinking hard, concocting pyramid schemes like Uncle Shurik, while the other country continued to grind out leather sofas and Daisy Duck place mats in places as stupid as Erie and Birmingham, as remote as Fairbanks and Duluth. He turned to Jordi, half expecting confirmation of his silent discovery, to find the latter studying Vladimir’s lower half through his champagne goblet, misty with breath. Jordi looked up, his heavy eyelids grown narrow with concentration; he let out three seconds worth of bullshit laughter then said, “Don’t get scared.”

Vladimir felt very scared, as if the Finnish doorlock to the Girshkin fortress was suddenly snapped open by an experienced hand, while the alarm system ceased its wail and the neighbor’s fierce suburban dog turned in for the night. The Fear-Money gland wasn’t even active yet, but the rest of him knew. “Hey, correct me if I’m wrong,” Jordi said, swinging his feet between their two beds, his trunks tight with the outline of his shaft, twisted and constrained by the elastic, “but you fooled around with Baobab before, right? I mean, you’ve been with other boys.”

Vladimir followed the single horrific spot of wetness along the inseam of Jordi’s trunks. “Who, us?” he said, jumping off the bed, so unsure of the fact that he had spoken that he repeated himself. “Who, us?”

“You’re so much like Baobab that way,” Jordi said, smiling and shrugging as if he understood this was something the boys just couldn’t do anything about. “It doesn’t mean you’ve got the homosexual feelings or anything, coco, though you could learn up on football a little. It’s just in your constitution. Look, I understand, and you’re not going to read about it in the Post tomorrow.”

“No, no, I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Vladimir began, working off the erroneous middle-class premise that when in trouble it was best to sound educated. “I have mentioned earlier my girlfriend—”

“Yes, good, okay,” Jordi said. “This discussion is over, prince.” Then, in one move, the technicalities of which were lost on Vladimir, he had sprung to his feet and snapped off his shorts, his penis swinging upward then falling into position. Vladimir averted his gaze from it, watching instead the bulbous shadow it cast upon the neatly made-up bed that separated them. Without warning, there was a flurry of motion: Jordi had struck his own head and cried out, “Wait! K-Y!” Vladimir’s instant recall was of the cabinet that contained Challah’s lubricant; quickly that image was discarded as irrelevant. He retreated in the direction of the balcony and the four-story drop, already calculating between the probable death behind him and what was in front of him.

But as Jordi reached down into the suitcase beneath him, Vladimir’s eyes made contact with the oak door to his rear—the kind of respectable door you would find gracing the better homes of Erie and Birmingham, Fairbanks and Duluth. There it was, the barrier that separated him from the outside world of hotel staff and sun-drenched retirees and acceptable person-to-person relations. In the single instant that it took to establish the association between himself and the door, he bolted.

A fist grabbed the tail of his billowing T-shirt, pulled, then slammed Vladimir, shoulder-first, into the wall. After the initial pain there was Jordi, or, more precisely, fragments of his sweating body—an armpit here, a nipple there—pressing against Vladimir’s face, until he found himself nose-to-nose with his tormentor. “Au va!” Jordi screamed, spitting into both his eyes, sinking his nails. “Fucking fogo! Twenty grand isn’t enough for you, bitch?”

Vladimir closed his eyes tightly, seeing the sting of the foreign saliva swirl into circle-eight figures of pain. “I didn’t—” he started to say but instantly forgot what it was that he didn’t. What came to mind instead was an image of Fran, her raised clavicle, her sideward-pointing breasts bunched together in a sports bra, her honest smile when she entered a room full of friends. She was going to make him into a human being, an indigenous citizen of this world.

And then Vladimir punched him.

He had never hit a person before in his life, or heard the crunch of knuckle bone ramming cartilage; once, enraged at the poolkeeper’s stupid collie at the upstate dacha, he had swatted its fluffy hind with a badminton racket: that was the extent of his violence.

Vladimir had hit the nose or near the nose, yet there was not a hint of blood between the two perfectly round and fur-lined nostrils; there was only Jordi’s measured nasal breathing and the wide-eyed look of a confused toddler whose xylophone had just been taken away, and for no apparent reason.

There was a momentary lapse in the pressure of Jordi’s nails buried in his shoulders, not that the weight of his hands had been altogether lifted, but there was, as Jordi’s absent expression suggested—a moment.

Vladimir ran. The door opened then slammed behind him, the carpet was arrow-red and seemed to point his way to the elevator, but he couldn’t afford to wait for the elevator to appear. Next to the elevator—stairs. He burst upon the humid staircase and began looping his way down, his feet at times heroic facilitators of his escape, at other times two dead objects over which the rest of his body threatened to trip, smashing his head into the concrete below.

The sound of pursuit was thankfully missing, but all that meant was that Jordi was on his way down in the elevator. Vladimir would bolt into the lobby right into Jordi’s arms. “There you are, boy,” Jordi would say, grinning unbearably as he explained to the hotel staff about their lovers’ spat. Yes, Vladimir had read about that happening once before and in a case involving a convicted cannibal, no less.

He landed hard on the last stair, a thigh tendon seemingly snapping beneath the weight of the rest of him. Vladimir limped into the velvet-and-glitter lobby where his face, distorted by lack of oxygen and sporting a ghastly hue, received a comprehensive round of looks from the geriatric crew manning the recliners. Not to mention his T-shirt torn at the shoulders.

Vladimir caught sight of the row of elevator banks, one assertively registering descent: “Three…… . Two…… .”

He had stood there transfixed by the numbers long enough to hear an elderly voice articulate a prolonged: “Vaat?”

Then he was out the palatial doors, past the circular driveway, and running with no heed for objects moving or stationary. Running quite literally, as they say, into the night, and the Floridian night, stinking of car exhaust, fast-food onions, and maybe a little something of the sea, accepted him and shrouded him in its boiling darkness.

16. GETTING IN WRONG

EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED. His body had been easily handled by a man whose intent was to hurt. And the man had done it, had smashed his shoulder and spit into both his eyes. How meager the insults of his childhood by comparison to what had just happened. All the miserable years of adolescence, the daily drubbing at the hands of parents and peers, had been no more than a dress rehearsal; all those years, it turned out, young Vladimir had only been preparing himself for victimhood.

He massaged and pressed his cheek against his damaged shoulder. It had been some time since he had had to provide tenderness for himself, and the self-pity felt unfamiliar, as if from another lifetime. He was resting, half-naked, against a squat little palm tree in what might have been a national forest but was actually the front garden of a vast condominium complex. And he was still having trouble breathing: the throaty tingle of an approaching hacking cough was upon him and he tried hard to ignore it. As a respected Park Avenue pediatrician had once told him, half of an asthma attack was psychological. One had to divert one’s attention with other matters.

The other matter, aside from the asthma, consisted of leaving Miami, of finding a cab and getting to the airport. Of course, Jordi was probably already on his way there, off to meet his estranged lover at Gate X departing for La Guardia. But this boundless Miami metroplex had more than one egress. There was, Vladimir remembered, another airport out of which his parents would fly on discounted carriers with names like SkyElegance and Royal American Air. It was Fort Lauderdale’s airport, up the coast.

Now what? He put on the remains of his T-shirt and coughed up a chunk of mucus thick as a sponge and traced with rills of blood. In his wallet Vladimir found the remnants of his take from his father and Mr. Rybakov: $1,200.00 in denominations large and small. Bonanza number two was a lone taxi circling the condo’s driveway, waiting for the crowd with smart shoes and breathing linen to come out and play. Vladimir scrambled past the shrubbery, then took his time strolling over to the cab, a millionaire enjoying the freedom of a torn shirt on a Sunday night. The cabdriver, some kind of Middle Eastern pituitary giant, nevertheless checked out his attire thoroughly in the rearview mirror and asked if Vladimir’s girlfriend had kicked his ass. His nameplate read Ben-Ari, or Son of a Lion, as Vladimir remembered from Hebrew school where many of these huge lion cubs were in evidence.

“And I’m leaving the bitch for good,” Vladimir said (given the events of the last hour, it was oddly comforting to appropriate that word—“bitch”). “To the Fort Lauderdale airport!” he commanded.

He waited till they were way past the Eden and into the North Beach section to pull into a phone booth under the swaggering shadow of O’Malley’s Blarney Leprechaun, with his three-for-one Guinness special. “Please wait for me,” Vladimir told the driver.

“No, I will drive off without the fare,” said the Son of a Lion, a friendly Israeli growl substituting for laughter.

He dialed Royal American Air and found out that it had gone out of business last Tuesday. SkyElegance now operated only between Miami and Medellín, although they were working on a nonstop to Zurich. Finally, a mainstream airline sold him a ticket on the next flight to New York for the equivalent of two weeks’ salary.

Vladimir didn’t blink at the price—he was still alive and possibly things would soon return to normal. Return to Fran, that is (the days measured out by cigarettes, chocolate, and coffee; the mornings with Frank talking shit about Kerensky’s provisional government over the breakfast table; the joys of opening one of Vincie’s packed lunch boxes at the Absorption Society: carpaccio-and-endive on toasted seven-grain, a generous sprig of balcony-grown mint, plus two tickets to a lunchtime concert at Trinity Church featuring a visiting Prava quartet—yes, he would need to spend forty days and nights just snuggling in bed with all three Ruoccos to cleanse himself of the last two hours).

In the interim, his recent maneuvers with the airline had empowered him, and now he was ready to dispense some authority Baobab’s way. He dialed the bastard collect, and after the familiar, bumbling voice hesitantly accepted the charges, Vladimir began without restraint: “So, I just spent some time looking over Jordi’s prick, and I meant to ask you, to borrow Jordi’s words, how do you take it?”

On the opposite end of the eastern seaboard there was silence. “And he still hasn’t given you the Brooklyn College franchise?” Vladimir said. “I think for all your hard work you might at least demand Brooklyn. Don’t sell yourself short, Thumper.”

“He didn’t, did he?” Baobab said.

“No, he didn’t, you living proof of social Darwinism. I’m standing by the road to the airport, my shoulder’s bashed in, I can hardly walk, but my asshole’s still intact, thanks for asking.”

“Listen.” Baobab paused as if he himself was listening. “I really didn’t… He would grope me sometimes or squeeze my ass, but I thought—”

“You thought?” Vladimir said. “Are you sure? Remember how you always had extra time on tests in school because you had the doctor’s note saying you were dyslexic? You faked that note, didn’t you? Come clean now. You’re not dyslexic, you’re just a fucking idiot, am I right?”

“Now—”

“Now let’s take stock, why don’t we? You’re twenty-five years of age, majoring in Humor Studies, your girlfriend can’t go to the movies without a legal guardian, and your boss is keen on banging your bum for kicks. And you wonder why you don’t get together with Fran and her friends more often? Believe me, that would be the last I’d ever see of Fran. Her anthropological curiosity only goes so far.”

“Okay,” Baobab said. “I heard you. Okay. Where are you, exactly?”

“Are you going to make everything all right, sweetheart?”

Baobab remained calm. “Where are you, Vladimir?”

“I told you, on the way to the airport. My meter’s running.”

“And where is Jordi?”

“Gee, I would think he’s trying to find me, unrequited love and all.”

“Cut it, cut it,” Baobab said. “So he tried to… And you ran away?”

“Well, I hit him first,” Vladimir said. “I socked him a nice one!” Socked him a nice one? When would this night end already?

“Jesus Christ. You really are fucked beyond anything. Listen, don’t take a plane to New York. Go to Wichita, go to Peoria—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” shouted Vladimir, a pinch of apprehension already registering on his uncharted Fear-Money gland, uncharted save for when it ran against his bladder. “What, he’s going to track me down in New York and kill me?”

“I doubt that he is the one that’s going track you down, but, yes, he might very well take the time out to kill you, and maybe fuck you one last time for good measure. Vlad, listen to me! He’s got a hundred people working for him in the Bronx alone. Last year my friend Ernest, this crazy spic who used to run the LaGuardia College franchise, he called Jordi a maricón, as a joke, you understand…”

“And?”

“‘And?’ you say? And? Who do you think these people are?” Baobab shouted. “The Catalan cartel! My God, the way they kill, the flair with which they commit violence… It’s modernismo! Even you Russians can learn a thing or two. And then there’s the fact that he tried to… That you know that he’s—”

“I see what you’re saying, now. You’re saying that although you were fully aware that this man is a killer and a pederast, you nonetheless encouraged me to go down to Florida with him. To stay in the same hotel with him.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know? I knew he liked that waif look, but you’ve got all that hair on your face.”

“Not anymore, you dolt!”

“Look, you needed the money!” Baobab said. “I thought this was a way to win back your respect. You’re the only friend I have, and you’ve been spending all your time—”

“Oh, so it’s my fault now. You are one deluded monkey, Baobab. I’m trying to stay mad at you, but it’s not easy considering… Considering this is just a night for me, but you’re going to spend an entire lifetime in this condition. Fare thee well, my poor sod.”

“Wait a second! He’s probably tapped my line. He’s probably going to have the Miami airport surrounded.”

“Well, he’s in for a surprise because I’m going to the Fort Lauderdale airport.”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t tell me that! The phone’s bugged.”

“Yes, and I’m sure all of Lauderdale is surrounded by angry Catalonians with semiautomatics and glossy headshots of me. Is there free therapy at City College? Why don’t you look into that after your humor class?”

“Wait! Forget the bus terminals and the train stations! And don’t rent a car! He can trace…”

Vladimir hung up and ran to his impatient Israeli.

“Onward!” he shouted.

“YOU’RE IN BIG trouble, nachon meod?” the Lion said. He laughed and laughed, upsetting the rearview mirror with his happy hands.

Vladimir looked up. He had actually been asleep for a minute or two. This is what extreme fear did to him after its initial effects petered out: it put him to sleep. A thoroughly fear-inducing, but somehow dreamless sleep, its sole background—a bottomless void.

A look out the window proved that all of Florida looked exactly the same from a moving vehicle. The sign on the opposite side of the highway read: BAL HARBOUR 20. Bal Harbour was to the immediate north of Miami Beach. That was good. They were headed in the right direction and the highway was empty.

Now what the hell was that Lion saying? Vladimir recognized the last two words from Hebrew school. “Nachon meod,” Vladimir repeated.

“So I was right!” the Israeli said. “You are a Russian Jew. No wonder you’re in trouble. You people are always in trouble. You make the Spanish look good.”

Hey, what did everyone have against the impoverished, yet always-yearning Russian people? “Aw, come on, hever,” Vladimir said, remembering the Hebrew word for “friend.” “You’re hurting my feelings.”

“I’m not your hever, asshole. So what did you do back there? Kill your girlfriend?”

Vladimir ignored his comment. He was on his way. Soon his long Floridian nightmare would be over. He would never have to look at a palm tree again, or deal with another coarse, gaudy, overweight peasant.

“Hey, doesn’t that sign say ‘airport?’”

The Lion hit his horn to warn a moped of impending disaster, then swerved right. They drove in silence for a while, the overhead roar of jet engines providing a soothing accompaniment for Vladimir, reminding him that in less than an hour it would be his turn to take to the air. Every sign they passed said “airport” now, or else “motel” or “lobster.” Eat, screw, and leave: that was the narrative of this particular highway.

Gradually, the traffic worsened, and the Lion began moaning familiar Hebrew curses, which constituted the bulk of Vladimir’s knowledge of that language. Whoredom was a big theme with the Israelites. ‘Go fuck your mother and bring me a receipt,’ that was a popular one. Sex, family, commerce—it pushed all the right buttons.

They were creeping along, now. The moon, low and pink, looked perfect for this setting (why was New York’s moon always so lofty and gray?).

There were two peach Cadillacs in front of them and one on the left. He must have booked a seat on some kind of senior citizens’ special. He looked at the flight info scribbled on his hand. He checked his still-unsold Rolex. Flight 320, depart Fort Lauderdale 8:20, arrive New York La Guardia 10:35. The official dénouement of his peripatetic little southern tragedy would soon be printed out on card stock and placed in a paper folder with the airline’s logo.

And then, a thought. Actually, more than a thought. Four thoughts. Coming together as one.

Depart Fort Lauderdale;

peach Cadillac;

two in front, one on the left;

Jordi’s trunks tight with the outline of his shaft, a single horrific spot of wetness spreading along the inseam.

HE SLIPPED TO the floor. Half of an asthma attack was purely psychological. You had to think straight. You had to say to yourself: I’m going to keep breathing.

“What is this?” the Lion shouted. He adjusted his rearview to get the full view of the cowering Vladimir. He turned his hundred-pound head around. “What are you doing? What shit is this?”

Inhale, exhale, one, two, three. With a wobbly wrist, Vladimir threw two hundred-dollar bills at the Lion. “Take the next exit back,” he whispered. “There’s been a mistake… I don’t want to go to the airport… They’re going to kill me.” The Lion kept looking at him. The outline of his droopy chest stared at Vladimir from the partition of his floral shirt, reminding Vladimir, for some reason, of a heart attack. Vladimir threw another hundred-dollar bill. And then another.

“Damn!” the Lion shouted. He hit the wheel in masculine fashion. “Damn, whore, fuck,” he said. He inched forward. He put on his turning light. Vladimir crept up and looked at the car on the left. The window was down; a young man with a mustache of no more than three hairs, sweating visibly in a silk jacket and buttoned-up shirt, was screaming something into his cell phone. His companion, a twin by the looks of him, was clicking something between his legs. He heard a language not unlike Spanish. No, French. He heard both Spanish and French. Vladimir crawled back down. He reemerged for a glimpse of the rear window. There was a peach Caddy directly behind them. And another one. And another one. There was a peach Cadillac in every lane. They were in a traffic jam of peach Cadillacs.

The Lion kept repositioning their car rightward. “I drive a cab,” he chanted. “I know nothing. Livery driver. Dual citizenship. Eight years here and I love it.”

Vladimir covered himself with a handy map of Georgia that was lying on the floor. He must have spent an hour like that: bathed in his own sweat, smelling the blood on his upper lip, cocooned within the furry hold of the Lion’s Crown Victoria. Each second he thought he head the clicking sound or the mention of “Girshkin” amid the international conversation next door. He found himself too exhausted to think about it. The dreamy void loomed ahead, but he could hardly permit himself to fall asleep. Stay awake! Breathe! Think of the turbo-prop skirting the runway, so close, too close… and yet copilot Rybakov knew exactly what he was doing, the fearless grin on that pumpkin face spoke of a history of near-misses.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, the Lion kept turning on the right signal, which emitted a comforting mechanical chime, the belltone of American civilization as far as Vladimir was concerned. The car drifted into the rightmost lane, then inched its way onto a service road. “Agaa!” the Lion shouted.

“What’s wrong?” Vladimir screamed.

But it must have been a war cry, a release of tension, because at that point the Lion stepped on the gas, and the car squealed past the following: a self-proclaimed “pancake palace”; a New Souls Rising Millennial Temple & Spa; an unidentified store shaped like an igloo; two minor country roads; fifty hectares of arable land; a grove of palm trees; the vast parking lot of something called Strud’s.

It was at Strud’s that the Lion came to a full and complete stop. The car’s suspension let out an ominous creak, which Vladimir immediately matched with a bloody exhale. “Get out!” the Lion said.

“What?” Vladimir wheezed. “I just gave you four hundred dollars.”

“Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!” the Lion screamed, the first two times in Hebrew, the final two in his new language.

“But look!” Vladimir shouted, indignity overcoming asthma. “We’re in the middle of…” It was hard to say where. “What am I supposed to do? At least drive me to the bus station. Or Amtrak, or, no… Let me think. Just drive north somewhere.”

The Lion spun around to face the back seat and grabbed Vladimir by his shirt. His face—stubby double-jointed nose, gray bags under the eyes glistening with sweat—reminded Vladimir of Jordi’s miserable physiognomy. And this was a fellow tribesman! They spoke the same language, had the same god, and the same-shade ass. There was a moment of silence in the car, save for the sound of Vladimir’s shirt tearing further in the Israeli’s hands and the heavy breathing of the Lion, who was clearly looking for words to elucidate the finality of their driver-passenger relationship. “Okay,” Vladimir preempted him. “I know where I’m going. I have nine hundred dollars left. Take me to New York.”

The Lion brought him closer, breathing onion and tahini all over his sweating passenger. “You,” he said. The next word could have been “little,” but the Lion chose to leave his harangue at the level of a pronoun.

He let go of Vladimir and turned around, crossing his arms on top of the steering wheel. He snorted. He uncrossed his arms and tapped the steering wheel. He pulled a golden Star of David from the confluence of his hairy cleavage and held it between thumb and index finger. This little ritual must have given him focus. “Ten thousand,” he said. “Plus the cost of an auto-train back.”

“But all I have is nine hundred,” Vladimir said, even as he caught his wrist sparkling in the sunlight. Success! He threw his Rolex over the Lion’s shoulder, where it made a rich and hopeful sound against his meaty lap.

The Lion gave the watch a healthy shake then held it against his ear. “No serial number on back,” he mused. “Automatic chronograph.” He consulted his Star of David once again. “Nine hundred dollars plus the Rolex plus five thousand more you get from a cash machine.”

“My credit limit is three thousand,” Vladimir said.

“Oofa,” the Lion said and shook his head. He opened his door and started moving his bulk outside.

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“I have to call my wife and explain things,” the Lion said. “She thinks I have a girlfriend.” And then, with shoulders hunched and both hands jammed into the pockets of his silk trousers, the Lion set off for the bleak discount wasteland of Strud’s.

VLADIMIR SLEPT THROUGH the eastern seaboard.

It wasn’t as if the drive was uneventful. The conked-out Vladimir, mumbling comforting childhood words in his sleep (kasha, Masha, baba), managed to miss a flat tire, a half-hearted chase by some inept South Carolina patrolmen, and the Lion screaming and flailing wildly as a friendly Southern critter, perhaps a chipmunk, rubbed up against him at a Virginia rest stop.

Twenty-five hours of uninterrupted sleep, that was the legacy of Vladimir’s northward journey.

He woke up in the Lincoln Tunnel, somehow knowing immediately where he was. “Good morning, criminal,” the Israeli grumbled up front. “Good morning and good-bye. Soon as we’re out of the tunnel, I will say shalom to you.”

“I think for five thousand dollars you can drop me off at my home,” Vladimir said.

“Ai! Listen to this gonif! And where is home? Riker’s Island?”

Where was home? Vladimir actually had to think about it for a second. But when it came to him, he couldn’t help but smile. It was three P.M. according to the dashboard clock and Francesca would likely be at home, in her bedroom mausoleum, surrounded by text and counter-text. He hoped that his twenty-four-hour absence, the missing humidity of his breath against her neck at night, the lacuna in his constant considerate companionship, in his “superhuman ability to abide,” to quote Joseph Ruocco, was already taking a toll on her; that when he walked through the door, her face would register something perfectly out of character—the unalloyed happiness of dating Vladimir Girshkin.

They turned down Fifth Avenue and Vladimir squirmed in his seat. Just a minute more. Come on, Lion! The Israeli nimbly cut through the traffic of yellow cabs, leaving raised fists and honking in his wake (just look at that upstart with the Crown Victoria and the Florida license plates). The names on the storefronts were now as familiar as family—Matsuda, Mesa Grill…In a previous lifetime, Vladimir had left a small fortune at each of them.

“Gonif comes home,” the Lion said, pulling up to the beige Art Deco of the Ruoccos’ building. “Don’t forget to tip,” he said.

Half-dazed and half-civil, Vladimir fished a final fifty-dollar bill out of the torn pocket of his torn shirt and passed it to his driver.

“Keep it,” said the Lion, suddenly avuncular. “And try to live a clean life if you can, that’s my advice to you. You’re very young. You’ve got a Jewish brain. There’s still hope.”

“Shalom,” Vladimir said. His strange adventures with the big Israeli were coming to an end. Closure was an elevator ride away. And there, ambling into the lobby with his unique dinosaur-like gait, was Joseph Ruocco, surviving the heat in his too-colonial-for-comfort khaki ensemble (“Conradian,” Fran had called it). Vladimir was about to surprise him with a shout of “Privyet!,” a familiar Russian greeting he had taught the Ruoccos, when he saw that the professor was accompanied by—

WELL, THAT WOULDN’T be accurate. First he heard the voice. No, first he heard the laughter. They were laughing. No, that’s not true either. First he heard the professor’s voice then he heard the bullshit laughter, then he heard the other voice, and then he saw.

A giant hand, gold-cuffed, Florida-brown, and smelling of baby powder was slapping the professor manfully about the shoulders.

A peach car of a familiar make was parked along the sidewalk of 20 Fifth Avenue, its blinkers blinking.

Jordi was making a new friend. One both funny and sad.

“What happened to your shirt?” the young Brazilian doorman started to ask Vladimir, almost loud enough for the professor and Jordi to hear at the opposite end of the lobby.

But before he could finish, the beat-up man before him, this little guy who accompanied the Ruoccos’ daughter every day, and who always seemed to the doorman either too sheeplike or too haughty for his own good…this trembling, barefaced Lothario was out the door, across the avenue, around the corner, gone from sight. He was history, thought the doorman, smiling at the phrase he had picked up from a headline in the Post.

“I’M NOT GOING to Wichita,” Vladimir said, the word “Wichita” rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. “I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.” But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients.

“Okay,” Baobab said. “Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.” He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: “Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.”

“The two of us can never meet in person,” he was saying loudly now. “We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.”

Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour.

“Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…” But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. “Vladimir, dear, hi!” Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. “Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?”

Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. “Prava,” he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers.

“Prava, how very now!” Roberta said. “Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.”

There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. “It’s a long story…” he began, “but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?”

“Talk to me, you big bear!” Roberta encouraged him.

“Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.”

“Okay, then,” Roberta said. “I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.”

“No,” Vladimir concurred. “No, you can’t.” What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old?

“But,” Roberta said, “I can get him the next best thing…”

17. THE AMERICAN PAGEANT

THE TREE WAS a rather frail and trampled-upon oak, its gnarly branches shadowing its equally beat-up cousin, the Bench. Tree and Bench existed together, now and forever, in the little park in back of the math-and-science high school where Vladimir and Baobab were issued an academic challenge and where, subsequently, they had failed to meet that challenge, and, instead, had retired to the Bench beneath the Tree. During a particularly upsetting acid trip, Baobab had carved his initials and those of Michel Foucault into the Bench, beneath which, in the style of lower-school girls, he had written, “BFF.” Best Friends Forever.

Vladimir, pining for the simplicity of those wasted days, bent down and traced the initials with one nostalgic finger, then held himself in check: Such nonsense!

A car horn went off behind him.

Roberta was peeking out of a cab door, waving her big yellow boater. “Get in!” she shouted. “They’re trailing Baobab uptown. Move!”

THEY HAD PULLED up to an old warehouse by the Holland Tunnel. The place was a low-ceilinged affair, its torn parapet floors patched up with strips of linoleum, a sign for Arrow Moving and Storage, the previous tenant, incompletely scraped off the front door. Vladimir was seated with Roberta in the rear section, which was roped off for “Guests of Naturalization Candidates.” The other “guests,” all marvelous actors and dear friends of Roberta, as was explained to Vladimir, looked dressed for a wedding, an Islamabad or Calcutta wedding—the number of turbans and saris among the attendees had reached critical mass. At any rate, gone was the dark-T-shirt-and-tight-trouser uniform germane to the ranks of young unemployed thespians.

It was a festive atmosphere: the handsome men and women milled about, playing with the balloons, arguing over coffee brands and whether moving to Queens was a viable alternative to a social life.

“What each of them wouldn’t do to get into Laszlo’s bunk,” Roberta said, while keeping one clammy hand upon Vladimir’s. She wore a manly herringbone suit and a transparent white shirt over a black bra of elaborate construction which brought out and augmented her meager bosom. Her hair had been tied back with little ribbons of silk, and her gaunt cheeks rouged. There was no mistaking her for a sixteen-year-old unless she opened her mouth and exposed her ironwork. “I,” she announced to Vladimir, pointing at her name tag, “am Katerina Nieholtz-Praga, scion of an old Austrian family, and wife of the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga. Al is getting his citizenship today, but purely for business purposes, you understand. His heart is still in Tuscany, with his olive farm, his two Arabians, and his mamma.”

“God help us all,” Vladimir said. He sat, stooped and unshaven, in a huge sports jacket Roberta had brought for the occasion. He had tried shaving in the bathroom of his room in the squalid Astoria motor lodge, which he had procured with his remaining fifty dollars, but found that he couldn’t keep his hands steady or his face still.

Laszlo walked out from the dressing room. He was a spindly gentleman, wearing a judge’s robe that barely reached down to his thighs, a sort of judicial miniskirt. Wisps of uncombed gray hair jutted out from his head in the shape of a lopsided crown. “Are you the client?” he asked Vladimir in remarkably clear English. He must have spent years scouring his Hungarian accent with steel wool. He probably couldn’t pronounce “paprika” at this point.

“That’s me,” Vladimir said. “How’s our man doing?”

“He’s real good, one hundred percent okay. Right now he’s in the dressing room, getting to know the other, you know, the citizens.” Laszlo folded his frame down to Vladimir’s level and put both hands on his shoulders; Vladimir flinched from recent experience.

“So,” Laszlo said, “this is our standard False Naturalization Ceremony Event, or FNCE, as we say in our industry. We do maybe a couple such events per year, and also a couple deluxe packages, which is the same thing but on a boat and with hookers.” And here Laszlo blinked, curling one tremendous brow. Roberta winked, too, and Vladimir, feeling the pressure, followed suit with a series of rapid blinking.

“Roberta said I can wire you the three thousand from Prava,” Vladimir spoke up.

“Yes, plus the FNCE standard package specialized one hundred percent lateness handling charge of an additional U.S. three thousand dollars. As per agreement!”

“I see,” Vladimir said. “Six thousand dollars.” The Hungarians were adapting to the free market quite nicely. He woud have to borrow some cash from Mr. Rybakov’s son. Still, it was nice of Roberta to fix this up on such short notice.

“Right,” Laszlo said. “Guests, assume your positions!”

The crowd of faux Zimbabweans, Ecuadorians, and the like scrambled over their folding chairs, brushing against one another and giggling. Laszlo climbed up the makeshift stage to his lectern, which was actually composed of several cardboard boxes expertly covered by an American flag and outfitted with a portable microphone. A colorful seal reading “Department of Justis” hung in the background, another excellent approximation, except for that slight misspelling and the somewhat frightened expression in the eye of the American eagle. “And now let us welcome the candidates for na-tu-ra-li-zation!” Laszlo boomed.

Applause from the guest sector as the candidates filed in one by one: Jewish and Anglo women in dark makeup and bizarrely overdone headdresses of grapes and mint leaves; men with wavy, blond hair and perfectly suburban physiognomies dressed as if they had just escaped from the set of The Man of La Mancha, and other such apparitions.

Mr. Rybakov hobbled in. He wore a dark blue suit, double-breasted and carefully tailored to minimize his paunch. Rows of red-and-yellow Soviet medals covered a great portion of his breasts, yet his tie sported the Stars and Stripes to accentuate his change of allegiance. He smiled inwardly, looking at the floor, trying to follow the footsteps of the kimono-clad woman in front of him.

Vladimir couldn’t help himself. Upon seeing the Fan Man he sprang to his feet and clapped the loudest, shouting with a Russian cheer, “Ura! Ura, Aleksander!” Roberta pulled on his jacket, reminding him that the point was not to get Rybakov riled up, but all the sailor did was smile meekly to acknowledge his friend, then took his seat beneath a giant crepe banner that read CONGRATULATIONS, NEW AMERICANS. They had parked him between the Italian industrialist Alberto Praga and another Caucasian-looking individual in order to avoid the previous incident with the Arab. However, in front of him sat a “Ghanaian” woman bearing a giant straw basket of fruits on her head, likely obscuring part of his view. That had been an oversight.

They sang the anthem, then Judge Laszlo rose and brushed his hand against his eyes, deeply affected by this particular rendition. “America!” Laszlo said and nodded with understanding.

“America!” Rybakov shouted from his seat, nodding similarly. He turned around to give Vladimir an upturned thumb.

Laszlo smiled at the Fan Man and pressed one finger to his mouth for quiet. “America!” he repeated. “As you can tell from my accent, I too once sat where now you sit. I came as a small child to this country, learned the language, the customs, worked my way through, ah, judge school, and now am most privileged to help you complete your long journey to American citizenship.”

There was spontaneous applause during which the Fan Man got up and shouted: “I come to Vienna first, then I go to America!”

Laszlo waved at him to sit down. He put his finger to his lips once again. “What is America?” he resumed, spreading his shoulders, looking up to the stained ceiling in wonderment. “Is it a hamburger? Is it a hot dog? Is it a shiny new Cadillac with a pretty young woman underneath a palm tree…?”

The guests shrugged and looked at each other. So many choices.

“Yes, America is all this,” Laszlo explained. “But it is more, much more.”

“I collect Social Security,” announced Mr. Rybakov, waving a hand for recognition.

Laszlo ignored him this time. “America,” he continued, both robed arms swinging through the air, “is a land where you can live a very long life and when it is time to die, when you look at yourself, you can say definitely: all the mistakes, all the triumphs I have had, all the Cadillacs and the pretty women, and the children that hate me so much they call me by my first name and not ‘daddy’ and not even ‘father,’ this is all because of me. Me!”

Laszlo’s students agreed, vigorously doffing their sombreros and waving around their kente cloth, repeating among themselves, “Me! Me!”

“This part of the Stanislavsky Method I don’t quite recognize,” Vladimir said.

“Ignoramus,” Roberta said.

The oath of allegiance was administered, the Fan Man mumbling right along, careful not to turn on his fellow candidates during the “all enemies, foreign and domestic” bit. Finally, they were called upon to get their certificates: “Efrat Elonsky… Jenny Woo… Abdul Kamus… Ruhalla Khomeni… Phuong Min… Aleksander Rybakov…”

Rybakov went up to the podium, dropped his crutches, and draped his arms around Laszlo who nearly buckled under the weight. “Thank you, Mister,” he whispered in his ear. He turned to Vladimir and waved his certificate through the air, his eyes streaming. “Ura!” he shouted. “Ura to America! I am America!” Vladimir waved back and took a snapshot with the Fan Man’s Polaroid. Despite the Ghanaian woman distributing ceremonial fruits from the basket on her head, despite Roberta loudly smooching the dapper Alberto Praga, yes, despite it all, Vladimir found himself moved. He blew his nose into the coarse, acrylic handkerchief that came with Roberta’s sports jacket and waved his little American flag made of a similar fabric.

THEY DIPPED PRETZELS into the baked salmon salad which Laszlo’s crew had spread out over the time-worn aluminum desks left over from the moving company. “This is not very much,” Mr. Rybakov said to Vladimir. “We can go home. I have herring.”

“Oh, I’ve eaten enough of your fish,” Vladimir said.

“Shut your mouth,” Rybakov said. “All the fish in the Caspian Sea would not be tribute enough for you, young King Solomon. Do you know what it has been like for me all these years? Do you know what it is like, to be a man without a country?”

Vladimir reached far across a table for another container of salmon, determined not to show his betrayal. And, yes, he knew what it was like.

“What if there is a war?” asked Mr. Rybakov. “How will you defend your motherland if you don’t have one?”

“That’s right, you can’t,” Vladimir said.

“Look at me, for example. I’m all alone in this country, I’ve got no family, no friends to speak of. You—you’re going to Prava. The Fan—all I had was the Fan, but now I have this!” He took the certificate out of his jacket pocket. “Now, I am a citizen of the greatest country in the world, if you discount Japan. Listen, I’m not young anymore, I’ve seen just about everything a man can see, so I know how it is: you’re born, you die, there’s nothing to it. You have to belong somehow, to be a part of a unit. Otherwise, what are you? You’re nothing.”

“Nothing,” repeated Vladimir. Laszlo was pointing to a clock. The show was almost over.

“But you, Vladimir, my dear young man, in Prava you will be part of something so big, so tight, you will never again have to wonder what unit you belong to. My son will take care of you like his own. And after I finish those business dealings with Miss Harosset and these damn Kandunsky paintings, may they all go to the devil, I will come and visit you and my Tolya. How about that?”

“We will have a great time, the three of us,” Vladimir said, picturing them rowing down a river with a basket of fried chicken and a jar of herring.

“And I will walk through the streets of Prava, with my chest stuck out proudly…” He stuck out his chest. “I will walk as a big, beautiful American.”

Vladimir put his arm around Mr. Rybakov’s lumpy back and pressed the old sailor to him. His smell reminded him of his step-grandfather’s who died in America after a prolonged bout with cirrhosis of the liver, kidney stones, and, if one could trust Dr. Girshkin’s diagnosis, an imploded lung. There it was—the vodka breath; the musky aftershave; and that certain brisk industrial scent, which brought to Vladimir’s mind the image of machine oil sprinkled liberally across the gears of a rusted Soviet metal press, the kind at which Vladimir’s step-grandfather once pretended to toil. It pleased Vladimir that the Fan Man smelled the same. “And now, Comrade Rybakov,” he said, “or, as we say in this country, Mister Rybakov, you will permit me to buy you several drinks.”

“O-ho,” Rybakov said and squeezed Vladimir’s nose with his many-flavored fingers. “Well, let’s go find a bottle then!” They helped each other out into the oddly silent street where the afternoon sun bore down on the cast-iron facades and on a string of idled moving vans.

HIS LAST FEW hours in Manhattan were spent in a cab with tinted windows; Roberta had been kind enough to advance him a thousand dollars from her considerable savings, and advised him to stay mobile and not to call anyone (especially “the woman”). As for Baobab, according to Roberta, he was holed up with relatives in Howard Beach, while his uncle Tommy tried to broker a cease-fire with Jordi.

Meanwhile, Vladimir spent two hundred dollars going around the limestone curve of the Flatiron building, down Fifth Avenue past the Ruoccos’ apartment house, then through the smaller Village tributaries that lead to the Sheridan Square subway station. It was from this station that Fran would daily disembark on her way back from Columbia, and Vladimir was entertaining the odd hope of seeing her, just one more glimpse, for memory’s sake. He made fifty of these trips, all of them in vain. It was remarkable the cabby didn’t drive him straight to Bellevue.

Fifth Avenue, the first Friday of September, the heat and business of a late afternoon, the shish-kebab stands closing down for the day, women with suggestive crescents of calf departing work at furious clips, another grand evening in the making here in the documented epicenter of the precise navel of the universe, the first New York evening that would pass without Vladimir in attendance. Yes, good-bye to all that. Good-bye to Vladimir Girshkin’s America, its lofty landmarks and sour smells, good-bye to Mother and Doctor Girshkin and their tomato patch, to the several strange-duck friends that were cultivated, to the flimsy goods and meager services that gave sustenance, and, finally, to his last hope of conquering the New World, to Fran and the Ruocco Family, good-bye.

And good-bye to Grandma. To think of America, he had to start with her, the only one who had consistently tried to better his stay here, she who had chased him over the hills and dales of the Girshkins’ upstate dacha trying to force-feed him wedges of cantaloupe, deep bowls of farmer cheese… How simple life would be if it began and ended with food-for-love and an old woman’s sloppy kiss.

And what of Fran? On his final Village circuit he thought he saw her, a straw hat, a bag of peppers for the Ruoccos’ nightly feast, a leisurely wave to an acquaintance passing by. He was mistaken. It was not her. But while he was under false impressions, his instinct was to lunge out of the slow-moving cab, press his lips to one studded ear, and say… what? “Nearly raped by a drug lord. Marked for death. Gotta run.” Even in contemporary circumstances, where just about everything is possible, this was not possible. Or perhaps he could have said it in terms she would appreciate, the words of the doomed Swede boxer in the Hemingway story:

“Fran, I got in wrong.”

But after this nonencounter with Fran, he ordered the driver to the airport. There was nothing more to be done. America, it seemed, was not entirely defenseless against the likes of Vladimir Girshkin. There was a sorting mechanism at work by which the beta immigrant was discovered, branded by an invisible ß on his forehead, and eventually rounded up and put on the next plane back to some dank Amatevka. The events of the last few days were no mere coincidence, they were the natural culmination of Vladimir’s thirteen years as an unlikely Yankee Doodle, a sad mark on his Assimilation Facilitator’s record.

Well, fuck America; or, in poetic Russian parlance, na khui, na khui. He was almost glad that he didn’t see Fran, that the past, which only yesterday was the present, was over. He had failed once again, but this time he had come away all the wiser. The boundaries, the contours of victimization at the hands of Mother, Girlfriend, and this dough-bellied adopted land of his, were all too clear. He would never suffer like that again. In fact, he would never be an immigrant again, nevermore a man who couldn’t measure up to the natives. From this day forward, he was Vladimir the Expatriate, a title that signified luxury, choice, decadence, frou-frou colonialism. Or, rather, Vladimir the Repatriate, in this case signifying a homecoming, a foreknowledge, a making of amends with history. Either way…Back on that plane, Volodya! Back to the part of the world where the Girshkins were first called Girshkins!

HE DUG HIS nails into his palms and watched tangible Manhattan become a cardboard skyline behind him. Soon enough he would remember precisely what he was leaving (everything; her) and have his little crying jag on the plane.

But a few hours later he would already be on the other side, the low-rent side of the planet, recovering, reconnoitering, thinking of pyramid schemes and rich Americans scarfing down pork and cabbage beneath a topcoat of Mittel Europa mist…

Thinking of getting in good.