The Russian Debutante's Handbook

18. THE REPATRIATION OF VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN

THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE, on the way from one jerry-built life to another, from the grim, disorganized airport in Leningrad with its faintly fecal odor and the toxic-sweet stench of Soviet detergent on the ground to the grim, organized one in New York where PanAm jumbo jets sat by departure gates like patient whales, Vladimir Girshkin had done the unthinkable and wept. It was the kind of outburst his father had prohibited at the conclusion of toilet training, on the grounds that there were few things left in the world that separated the sexes, but tears and sniffling certainly headlined the list. On that pug-nosed Aeroflot liner, trapped between rows of American tourists playing tea time with their hard-currency samovars and discovering the pleasant reductive logic of the Russian nesting doll, a livid Dr. Girshkin, surely comical-looking to the Westerners around him in his torn leather parka and ruined horn-rimmed glasses (both victims of last-minute violence at the hands of his wife), grabbed his son by the collar and ordered him to the lavatory to complete his whimpering.

As the older Vladimir now sat in a similar aluminum loo thousands of meters above Germany, his jeans around his ankles, his flowing nose in a towelette, his thoughts easily came around to his earlier bout of transatlantic despair: the customs hall in Pulkovo Airport, Leningrad, the spring of 1980.

It was only on the night before the Girshkins’ departure that the strange truth had finally been revealed to Vladimir: The family would not be taking the train down to their hutlike dacha in Yalta as had been promised; instead, they were to fly to a secret place, its very name unmentionable. A secret place! An unmentionable name! A-a! Small Vladimir was soon hopping about the apartment, jumping from suitcase to suitcase, making a fort out of the closet using his heavy galoshes as battlements, nearly precipitating an asthma attack through his adolescent rampage. Mother restricted him to the living-room couch, which smelled of childhood sweat and served as his bed come ten o’clock, but Vladimir would not be so easily restrained. He grabbed Yuri the Giraffe, the stuffed war hero whose spotted chest was pinned down with Grandfather’s Great Patriotic War medals, and threw the rattling creature up against the ceiling until the perennially unhappy Georgians in the flat above began stomping for quiet. “Where are we going, Mama?” Vladimir shouted (back then she was still known to him informally as Mama). “I’ll find it on the map for you!”

And Mother, paranoid that her easily excitable son might spill their destination to the neighbors, only said, “Far.”

And Vladimir, jumping through the air, said, “Moscow?”

And Mother said, “Farther.”

And Vladimir, jumping still higher, said, “Tashkent?”

And she said, “Farther.”

And Vladimir, now reaching nearly the same height as his flying giraffe, said, “Siberia?” Because that’s as far as it got, and Mother said that no, it was even farther than that. Vladimir spread out his beloved maps and traced his finger farther than Siberia, but it wasn’t even the Soviet Union out there. It was something else. Another country! But nobody ever went to another country. And so Vladimir spent the night running around the flat with volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia under his arm, screaming in alphabetical order, “Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bermuda…”

It was the next day at customs, however, that the Girshkins’ departure took a turn for the worse. The well-fed men of the Interior Ministry in their tight polyester uniforms, now completely without reason for concealing their hatred for the soon-to-be ex-Soviet family before them, obliterated their luggage, tearing apart the wide-collared Finnish shirts and the few passable business suits smuggled through the Baltics, clothes which Vladimir’s parents had hoped would last them through their first interviews in New York. This was done ostensibly to find any hidden gold or diamonds that exceeded the minuscule amount allowed to leave the country. As they tore through Mother’s address book, shredding anything with an American address, including her Newark cousin’s instructions on how to get to Macy’s, a particularly large gentleman, whom Vladimir would never forget as having had a mouth frighteningly empty of teeth (even the silver kind that were standard issue to middle-aged Warsaw Pact citizens) and a strong smell of sturgeon on his breath, said to her: “You’ll be back, Yid.”

The agent had proved to be rather prescient, for after the Soviet Union collapsed Mother did return on several occasions to buy up a few choice pieces of the former empire for her corporation, but at the time all that occurred to Vladimir was that Mother—the bulwark against the storm outside the window, the woman whose word was the law of the household, from whose hands could come either a mustard compress that would torture through the night or a glossy volume on the Battle of Stalingrad that would be moored by his bedside for a year—was a Yid. Granted he had been called a Yid before; in fact, he had been called that every time his health allowed him a foray into the gray world of Soviet education. Yet he had always thought of himself as being the most thorough of Yids—small, stooped, sickly, and with a book regularly by his side. But how could anyone say that of Mother who not only read to Vladimir about the Battle of Stalingrad but looked ready to wage it all by herself.

And to Vladimir’s surprise, as the pages of her address book scattered about her and as the customs agents roared in appreciation of Comrade Sturgeon-Breath, Mother did nothing but twist the strings of her little leather purse around her whitened hand, while Dr. Girshkin, avoiding the frightened gaze of his son, made slight and ambiguous gestures toward the departure gate and their escape.

Then, before he knew it, they were buckled in, snow-covered, gas-streaked Russia rolling beneath the airplane’s wings, and only then did Vladimir allow himself the luxury, the necessity, of crying.

Now, thirteen years hence, with the jet headed in the opposite direction, Vladimir felt the intervening years effortlessly collapsing into a meaningless interlude. He was the same little Volodechka with the Yid last name, with the eyes puffed from crying and the nose wet from running. Only this time destiny wasn’t a Hebrew school carefully landscaped into a sylvan Scarsdale lot followed by a progressive Midwestern college. This time around, destiny was a gangster named after a fuzzy marmot.

And this time there would be no room for those silly mistakes—those slips of the amateur assimilationist—that had nearly cost him his life a week ago in a fading Floridian hotel room with that loose-fleshed naked old man; those brief bouts of idiocy and self-victimization that had put him on this Lufthansa flight fleeing New York and his imperious Francesca in disgrace. They belonged to an earlier Vladimir, a sweet and transparent one for whom the world had little use.

There was a knock on the bathroom door. Vladimir wiped his face, stuffed his pockets full of emergency tissue, and headed out past the rows of grumbling retired Virginians on a group tour waiting for the facilities, some with their cameras slung around their necks as if in preparation for that wayward Kodak moment en route to the crapper. He resumed his seat next to the window. The plane was riding over a patched carpet of thin, feathery clouds, a sign, his father had taught him over one country breakfast at the dacha, of an impending change in weather.

VLADIMIR STOOD ON the ramp breathing European air, his shirtsleeves rolled down against the autumn wind. The Virginians were gasping at the lack of modern connecting gates between the plane and the tired-looking green terminal, which Vladimir nostalgically pegged as late-socialist architecture, the kind built after local architects had long given up on constructivism and just said: “Hey, here’s some greenish glass and something not unlike cement. Let’s make a terminal.” Above the building, in large white letters: PRAVA, REPUBLIKA STOLOVAYA. Oddly enough, in Russian “Republika Stolovaya” meant “the Cafeteria Republic.” Vladimir smiled. He was a big fan of the meaty Slavic languages: Polish, Slovak, and now this.

Then the passport check, where his first Stolovan native appeared, light-haired and beefy, with a beautiful golden mustache. “No,” he said to Vladimir, pointing first to the passport photo of the college-era Vladimir with his goatee in full bloom and his dark, wispy hair extended to his behind, and then to the newly shaved, short-haired Vladimir before him. “No.”

“Yes,” Vladimir said. He tried to assume the same tired smile as in the passport, then pulled on his emerging chin hairs to indicate the forest to come.

“No,” the passport agent said meekly, but stamped Vladimir’s passport anyway. Clearly, socialism had fallen.

He picked up his valise at the luggage carousel and was ushered along with the Americans into the arrival lounge where a gleaming American Express cash machine lay in wait for them. The visiting moms and dads were picking their offspring out of a line-up of slick, young urban types, dressed as if they had just burgled New York’s famed Screaming Mimi’s boutique. Vladimir made his way through the maternal hugs and paternal shoulder-slapping to the doors, which, through a cryptic red arrow, promised escape. But he also took note of the situation: young Americans being visited by their moneyed elders. Moneyed? At least middle-class, these fiftysomethings in rumpled cords and goofy oversized sweaters. And nowadays the upper class looked down to the middle for tips on casual dressing, so anything was possible.

And then, as instantaneously as a plane falling out of the sky, the scene was russified.

Small-arms fire exploded outside.

A dozen car alarms engaged.

A detachment of men, each with a small Kalashnikov at hip level, swiftly parted the Americans into two screaming herds.

The requisite red carpet was rolled out between them.

A convoy of BMWs and armor-plated Range Rovers was assembled in protective formation.

A crepe banner bearing the curious legend PRAVAINVEST #1 FINANCIAL CONCERN WELCOME THE GIRSHKIN was unfurled.

And only then did our man finally catch sight of his new benefactor.

Flanked by three associates, all aglow in their nylon sports jackets and matching space-age trousers made out of alpaca or maybe silicon, the Groundhog solemnly approached. He was a burly, pocked little man with his eyes slightly crossed and his hair parted to make the least of a disappearing hairline.

The Groundhog placed one paw on Vladimir’s shoulder, holding him in place (as if he would dare move), then stuck out his other hand and, in his best Ukrainian accent, said rhetorically: “You are Girshkin.”

Yes, Girshkin he was.

“So, then,” the Groundhog said, “I am Tolya Rybakov, the president of PravaInvest, also called…” He looked around to his two immediate associates—one Groundhog-sized, the other closer to Vladimir’s physique—both too busy staring closely at Vladimir to pay their boss any mind. “As my father might have told you, I am also called… the Groundhog.”

Vladimir continued to shake his hand, trying to make up for his own hand’s small size with vigor and motion, while muttering, “Yes, yes, I have heard. Very pleased to meet you, Mister Groundhog.”

“Just Groundhog,” the Groundhog said tersely. “We don’t use titles in this company. Everyone knows who they are. This—” he pointed to the enormous man with small Tatar eyes and a bald dome encircled by rings of wrinkles like the cross-section of a sequoia, “This is our chief operations officer, Misha Gusev.”

“Are you called the Goose?” Vladimir asked, seizing on the name’s Russian meaning and the Groundhog’s penchant for animal names.

“No,” Gusev said. “Are you called the Jew?”

The Groundhog laughed and waved an accusatory finger at Gusev, while the third man—small but solid, with blond hair as fine as a baby’s, his eyes cobalt blue the way Lake Baikal’s waters had been some centuries ago—shook his head and said, “Forgive Gusev, he is a serious anti-Semite.”

“Yes, right,” Vladimir said. “We all have our…”

“Konstantin Bakutin,” the third man said, offering his hand. “Call me Kostya. I am the Chief Financial Officer. Congratulations on your exploits with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That’s a tough nut to crack, and it’s not like we haven’t tried.”

Vladimir began to thank his conational in his most weighty, elaborate Russian, but the Groundhog pulled them outside, where between clusters of tour buses and forlorn Polish-made taxis stood a caravan of BMWs, each sporting a yellow “PravaInvest” logo across the bow, each surrounded by tall men in purple jackets of an unusual cut, loosely bridging the gap between business suit and smoking jacket. “These are mostly Stolovans,” explained the Groundhog. “We hire a lot of local labor.” He waved to his people as Gusev stuck two thumbs into his mouth and whistled.

In an impressive piece of postmodern choreography, twelve car doors were opened simultaneously by twelve lanky Stolovans. An associate relieved Vladimir of his luggage. Inside, the sober German interiors were violated beyond comprehension with Jersey-style zebra-striped seats and woolly cupholders.

“Very pleasant decor,” Vladimir said. “Very, as they say in American computer circles, user-friendly.”

“Oh, Esterhazy does these for us,” the Groundhog said, whistling to a hairy little man sulking about in the shadows of a Range Rover. Esterhazy, bare-chested in his black leather jacket, his leather pants capped off by suede Capezios, waved a pack of Camel cigarettes at Vladimir and gave the Hog a thumbs-up. “Yes, the Hungarians have always been ahead of the times,” said the Groundhog, almost sighing with jealousy.

With this international discussion at an end, the procession took off for the highway, Vladimir watching out for the first telltale signs—the flora and fauna, the brick and mortar—of his new country. Within minutes, the brick and mortar appeared on both sides of the road, like a signpost signaling VLADIMIR’S CHILDHOOD, NEXT HUNDRED EXITS: an endless stretch of rickety plaster Soviet-era apartment houses, each edifice peeling and waterlogged so that the inadvertent shapes of animals and constellations could be recognized by an imaginative child. And in the spaces between these behemoths were the tiny grazing spaces where Vladimir sometimes played, spaces adorned with a fistful of sand and some rusty swings. True, this was Prava and not Leningrad, but then these houses formed one long demented line from Tajikistan to Berlin. There was no stopping them.

“First lesson in the Stolovan language,” Kostya said. “These housing complexes the Stolovans call panelaks. It is evident why, no?” When nobody answered, Kostya said, “Because they look like they’re made out of panels.”

“But we don’t bother learning Stolovan,” the Groundhog said. “The bastards can all speak Russian.”

“If they give you any problems,” Gusev said, “give me a ring, and we’ll run them over like we did in ’69. I was there, you know.”

The blocks of flats continued for at least another ten minutes, interrupted occasionally by the grimy sarcophagus of an overused power station or the Orwellian skyline of factory smokestacks barely visible from within the billowing clouds of their own emissions. At times, Vladimir would point to a rising office tower marked as the future site of an Austrian bank, or an old warehouse being spruced up to accommodate a German car dealership, at which point his hosts would say as a chorus: “Everywhere you turn, money for the taking.”

Just as the panelaks seemed ready to run out and the Prava of travel brochures about to redeem her promise of cobblestone streets bisected by the silver indentations of tram lines, the procession lurched to the right along a winding sandy path that on occasion would break out into asphalt, as if to show the motorcade just how civilized life could sometimes be. In the distance, perched against the bluff of an eroded hill, the Groundhog’s own panelak compound awaited, its balconies like the parapets of a vast socialist fortress. “Four buildings, two constructed in ’81, two in ’83,” the Groundhog rattled off.

“We got the whole thing in ’89 for less than 300,000 dollars U.S.,” added Kostya, and Vladimir wondered whether he should commit these figures to memory in the event of a quiz. Instantly, he felt tired.

They pulled into the compound’s quadrangle where several American jeeps stood at attention alongside a tank with a gaping hole for a barrel. “Very good,” said the well-disposed Groundhog. “Gusev and I have to take off for town, so Kostya will show you your apartment. Tomorrow we have what I call the biznesmenski lunch. That’s a weekly event, by the way, so bring some ideas, write something down.”

Gusev sneered good-bye and the motorcade began the complicated task of making their way around the tank and heading onward to golden Prava, while Kostya, whistling a Russian folk tune concerning boysenberries, waved Vladimir toward the entrance of a building unceremoniously labeled #2.

The lobby was cramped with two dozen men and their rifles, sweating away beneath a bare light bulb; loose playing cards and empty liquor bottles covered the floor, and several flies, thick and dazed with overfulfillment, lethargically scuttled about the landscape. “This is Vladimir, an important young man,” Kostya announced.

Vladimir bowed slightly in the manner of an important young man. He turned around to make sure he wasn’t leaving anybody out. “Dobry den’,” he said.

A man of indeterminate age, his face covered with red beard and glow-in-the-dark children’s Band-Aids, lifted his Kalashnikov and mumbled back the greeting. Evidently he was speaking for everyone.

“Gusev’s top men,” Kostya said as they turned into a corridor. “All former Soviet Interior Ministry troops, so I wouldn’t step on their toes. Don’t ask me what exactly we need them for. Certainly don’t ask Gusev.”

The corridor ended with a door slightly ajar, the word KASINO written upon it with industrial grease, and Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” audible within. “In need of renovation,” said Kostya as a forewarning, “but still a money-maker.”

The Kasino was the size of Vladimir’s math-and-science high school gymnasium, and seemed to have as much to do with gambling as the other facility did with sports. Clusters of folding tables and chairs were filled with young blond women smoking and trying to look dangerous in the brief light of several halogen lamps.

“Dobry den’,” the gentlemanly Vladimir said, although by then the den’ might have very well turned into evening outside the Kasino’s windowless gloom. A frontal mass of unfiltered smoke floated his way from the lungs of a woman whose skin was the greenish color of raw onion, and whose tiny body was seemingly held in place by the weight of her shoulder pads.

“This is Vladimir,” Kostya said. “He’s here to do things with the Americans.”

The trance was broken: the women pulled themselves up and crossed their legs. There was giggling and the word “Amerikanets” was said many times. The vixen with the shoulder pads struggled to her feet, leaning against her folding table for support, and said in English, “I am Lydia. I am driving Ford Escort.”

The others thought that tremendously witty and applauded. Vladimir was about to say a few encouraging words on their behalf, but Kostya took his arm and escorted him out of the Kasino, saying, “Ah, but you must be tired from travel.”

They went up two flights, the staircase redolent of beef stew and the starchy smells of Russian family life, and emerged onto a brightly lit corridor of flats. “Number twenty-three,” said Kostya, swinging about a key chain like a bed-and-breakfast proprietor.

They went in. “Main room,” Kostya said with an epic sweep of the arm. The space was filled entirely by an olive-colored Swedish couch, a bulky television set, and Vladimir’s opened and searched-through valise. The magazine articles he had photocopied on Prava’s expatriate scene were scattered about; his punctured shampoo bottle was gurgling under the couch, a river of green trailing away from it. Ah, those curious Russians. It was nice to be back in a land of transparency.

“Next stop, bedroom with a nice big bed,” Kostya said. There was also a simple oakwood dresser and a window overlooking the smokestacks defining the horizon. “Here is a kitchen with good equipment, and there is a small room for working and thinking important thoughts.” Vladimir peeked into a walk-in closet occupied by a school-sized desk and a Cyrillic typewriter on top of it. He nodded.

“In Moscow this apartment would be for two families,” Kostya said. “Hungry?”

“No, thank you,” Vladimir said. “On the plane, I—”

“A drink, maybe?”

“No, I feel rather—”

“Then to bed.” Kostya put his hands on Vladimir’s shoulders and guided him into the bedroom, reminding Vladimir of how freely Russians touched one another; such a change from his adopted homeland across the ocean, where even his father, the once-earthy friend of the collective farmer, had been keeping a proper American distance as of late. “This is my card,” Kostya said. “Call at any time. I am here to protect you.”

Protect? “But aren’t we all comrades together?” said travel-weary, sleepy-eyed Vladimir, as if he were auditioning for Soviet Sesame Street.

No answer to that question was forthcoming. “After the biznesmenski lunch,” Kostya said, “the two of us will go see Prava. I have a feeling you will have an appreciation for the city’s beauty, which the rest of our cadre… Well, what can I say? I’ll get you tomorrow.”

AFTER HE LEFT, Vladimir went through his luggage looking for a bottle of minoxidil. Per Francesca’s admonitions against premature baldness, he was becoming something of a hair-tonic addict. He went into the toilet, which was a drab affair, distinguished by a shower curtain with a larger-than-life peacock, its plumage blazing, its drooling beak ready to make love to anything remotely feathered and egg-bearing.

Vladimir moved the hair aside from his temples, found the areas in need, and rubbed down a prolific amount of the minoxidil to make up for the round missed on the plane. He watched his eyes narrow in the bathroom mirror while a single wayward drop of the drug descended his forehead to pollinate his goatee.

In the bedroom, he felt the thick down comforter, its outer casing embroidered with flowers just the way they had made them in Leningrad. Vladimir was ready to crawl under it, but something happened—his knees must have weakened and he found himself on the carpet, which was as scraggly as his chin. Several things occurred to him. Fran, Challah, Mother, home. He was trying to keep his eyes open and focused on the perfectly white ceiling above him, yet, in the end, even the promise of the comforter and its mothering qualities failed to keep him awake, and he fell asleep on the floor.

19. MAKING NEW FRIENDS

THE BIZNESMENSKI LUNCH was in full roar. A red-nosed, pot-bellied cretin who had been introduced to Vladimir as the junior deputy assistant to the associate director for financial oversight had said some questionable things about the Groundhog’s Ukrainian girlfriend and was in the process of being ejected by a pair of enormous men in purple jackets. His screams grew even louder after the doors were closed behind him, but Vladimir’s tablemates hardly seemed to care—additional cartons of Jack Daniel’s were being wheeled into the dining room by the Kasino crew, undressed to the hilt for the occasion.

Across the table a dozen chicken Kievs had been laid waste to, and now formed a poultry Borodino of twisted bones and splattered butter. There was much argument about whether the sausages in the center of town were best inside American-style buns or on a traditional piece of rye bread, and every statement was punctuated by the sharp exhale of cigarette smoke and a leisurely reach for the bottle.

Vladimir coughed and wiped his eyes. At one end of the table Kostya was quietly putting away a side of mutton; at the other end, an elk of a Slav—one of the several that formed the heavily boozed cortege around Gusev—shouted praise of rye bread and vodka, and cucumbers so fresh from his garden, they still smelled like shit.

Then the Groundhog’s fist came down on the table hard and there was silence. “Okay,” said the Groundhog. “Bizness.”

The silence continued. The bushy-browed gentleman next to Vladimir turned to face him for the first time throughout the meal, eyeing him like a second helping of chicken. Eventually the others followed suit, until Vladimir poured himself a shot with shaking hands. He had been abstaining from food and drink all afternoon out of nervousness, but now that seemed less than a good idea. “Hi,” Vladimir said to the assembled. He looked down to his whiskey as if to a TelePromp Ter, but the clear liquid had nothing to impart except courage. He drank. Oofa! On an empty stomach it was quite a depth charge.

“Don’t be scared, have some more,” the Groundhog said. There was polite laughter led by Kostya who was trying to put a friendly spin on the hilarity.

“Yes,” Vladimir said, and drank again. The second whiskey made such an impression on his empty gullet that Vladimir jumped to his feet. The Russians leaned back; there was the rustle of hands locating holsters underneath the table.

He looked to his notes, which were written in huge block letters and littered with exclamation points, like agit-prop slogans in a May Day parade. “Gentlemen,” Vladimir announced. But then he paused just as quickly as he had started… He had to take a breath. It was happening! This nebulous plan he had patched together during his last days in New York was coalescing into something as tangible as an Austrian bank or a German car dealership. “They say Uncle Shurik specialized in pyramid schemes,” his father had told him, standing in the fertile backyard of the Girshkin estate, feeding his son flounder. “Know what those are, Volodya…?”

Aha. He knew. Pyramid schemes. Also known as Ponzi schemes, after one Carlo Ponzi, Vladimir’s new patron saint, the alpha immigrant from Parma, the little gonif that could.

Vladimir looked to the Russians sitting before him. Those dear elks. They smoked too much, drank too much, killed too much. They spoke a dying language and, to be honest, were themselves not too long for this world. They were his people. Yes, after thirteen years in the American desert, Vladimir Girshkin had stumbled upon a different kind of tragedy. A better place to be unhappy. He had finally found his way home.

“Gentlemen,” Vladmir said once again. “I want to do a pyramid scheme!”

“Oh, I like pyramid schemes, brothers,” said one of the more amiable elks who wore the airbrushed image of his bloated, mangy-haired toddler on his lapel. But in other quarters the grumbling and eye-rolling had already started. Pyramid scheme? Not again.

“Perhaps it doesn’t sound like the most original idea,” Vladimir continued. “But I’ve done some research and discovered the perfect population for just this sort of thing. Right here in Prava.”

Gasps and muttered confusion around the table. The biznesmeni looked to one another as if this mysterious population might be somehow personified by Grisha the Kasino manager, or Fedya the director of sales and promotions. Whom else did they know in this town?

“Are you speaking of the Stolovans?” the Groundhog said. “Because we’ve already taken the Stolovans for a ride. We’re under investigation by the ministries of finance and public health, and by the department of fishing and hatcheries, too.”

“Yes, no more Stolovans,” his associates muttered.

“Gentlemen, how many Americans do you know?” Vladimir said.

The muttering stopped, and all eyes turned to a thin, shaky young man named Mishka who had spent much of the meal in the bathroom. “Hey, Mishka, how about that little girl of yours?” Gusev said. There was laughter and enough male horsing around for Vladimir to get a few friendly kicks in the shins and an elbow to the ribs.

Mishka was trying to sink his great big head into his tiny shoulders. “Stop it. Shut up,” he said. “I didn’t know it was that kind of bar. Groundhog, please tell them…”

“Mishka met an American girl with a penis,” several people eagerly explained to Vladimir. More bottles were uncorked and toasts made to the hapless Mishka who scurried out of the room.

“No, no, I don’t mean that segment of the population,” Vladimir said. “I mean the whole English-speaking expatriate community in Prava. We’re talking roughly fifty thousand people here.” Well, give or take thirty thousand.

“And do you know how much money they have on average?” He looked each man in the eye before answering, although, truthfully, he had no idea. “Ten times as much as the average Stolovan. This is roughly speaking again. Now, the beauty of this project is essentially this: turnover. Americans come, Americans go. They stay for a few years, then they go back to Detroit and get lousy jobs in the service industry or at their father’s firm. While they’re here, we milk them for all they’re worth. We promise to send them dividends across the ocean. And when we don’t, what are they going to do? Come back and prosecute? Meanwhile, we’ve got fresh blood arriving by the planeload.”

The men twirled their drinks and tapped their chicken bones against the china in contemplation. “All right. My question is this,” Gusev said. He stabbed out his cigarette with one brusque jab—a nice statement of purpose in itself. “How do we get the Americans to invest in the first place? These are, to my knowledge, mostly young people and so they’re gullible, but they’re not exactly everyday investors.”

“A good question,” Vladimir said. His eyes traveled the room as if he were a substitute teacher trying to conquer a new domain. “Did everyone hear the question? How do we get the Americans to invest in the first place? Here is the answer: self-esteem. Most of these young men and women are trying desperately to justify their presence in Prava and the interruption of their education, their careers, and so on… We make them feel like they’re taking part in the resurgence of Eastern Europe. There’s an American saying, spoken by a famous black man: ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ This saying has deep resonance in the American psyche, particularly among the liberal kind of American this city attracts. Now, we’ve got them not only becoming part of the solution but making money in the process. Or so they’ll think.”

“And you believe this can actually be accomplished?” the Groundhog said quietly but directly.

“Yes, and I’ll tell you what it takes!” Vladimir cried to his disciples, throwing his arms in the air with Pentecostal fervor, the zeal of the born-again. “It takes glossy brochures. We’ll have to have them professionally made, not here, perhaps in Vienna. Oh, and we’ll need artists’ renderings of the five-star resort on Lake Boloto that we’re never going to build, and then an annual report featuring the smoky factories knocked down to make way for pleasant little corporate parks with recycling bins for glass and newspapers… Sure, plenty of environmental stuff. That will sell. I see holistic centers and Reiki clinics, too.”

He was on a roll. There was no more grumbling. Gusev was scribbling on his napkin. Kostya was whispering to the Groundhog. The Groundhog first seemed agreeable to Kostya’s counsel, but a minute later the mercurial Hog slammed the table once again. “Wait one minute,” the Groundhog said. “We don’t know any Americans.” Kostya had set him up well.

“That, friends,” Vladimir said, “is why I’m here with you today. I propose that I single-handedly infiltrate the American community in Prava. Despite my fluent Russian and my tolerance of drink, I can easily double as a first-rate American. My credentials are impeccable. I have attended one of the premier liberal-minded colleges in the States and have a profound appreciation for the dress, manners, and outlook of the disaffected young American set. I have lived many years in New York, the capital of the disaffected movement, have had many angry, disenfranchised friends of the artistic persuasion, and have just completed a romantic liaison with a woman who in both looks and temperament personifies the vanguard of this unique social group. Gentlemen, with no intention of conceit, I assure you—I am the best there is. And that’s that.”

Kostya, that dear man, began to applaud. This was a lonely sound at first, but then the Groundhog picked up one hand, looked it over as if instructions were written on the back, sighed, picked up the other hand, sighed again, and finally brought his hands together. Immediately, dozens of fat, sweaty palms began smacking one another, there were shouts of “Ura!” and Vladimir turned crimson.

This time it was Gusev who put his fist down and silenced the table. “What do you want?” he said. “For yourself, that is.”

“Not much, actually,” Vladimir said. “I need a certain amount per week for drinks, drugs, taxis, whatever it takes to ingratiate myself in the community. Based on experience, I know that it is best to be seen in as many clubs, bars, cafés as possible, thereby creating a self-perpetuating aura of notoriety. What this costs in Prava, I don’t know. In New York, with housing taken care of, I would wager three, four thousand dollars a week. Here, I believe, two thousand would suffice. Plus an initial six, seven thousand in relocation costs.” That would take care of his little debt to Laszlo and Roberta.

“I think Gusev means what do you want in terms of profit-sharing,” said the Groundhog, looking to Gusev for confirmation.

Vladimir held his breath. Did they mean on top of his ludicrous two-thousand-a-week request? Did they have any idea… But, wait a second, could he have betrayed his ignorance of bizness etiquette by not asking for profit sharing… There seemed enough money to go around; the dining hall looked like a Versace showroom. There was nothing left to do but shrug and declare nonchalantly: “Whatever you think reasonable. Ten percent?”

There was consensus throughout the room. It certainly seemed reasonable. When these men thought percentages it was usually in increments of fifty. “Comrades,” Vladimir said. “Fellow biznesmeni, I want you to be convinced—I’m not out to fleece you. I am what in America is called a ‘team player.’ So…”

So? He tried to come up with an appropriate segue. “So let’s drink to success!”

After this there were many toasts in favor of the team player. A queue was forming to shake his hand. Several boisterous entrepreneurs had to be ejected from the room after stepping out of turn.

THEY PULLED AWAY from the compound. It was a breezy, beautiful day; even the chemical haze seemed agreeable to Vladimir: its job was to correct the eternally smiling, self-satisfied sun with a measure of historical accuracy. Kostya sat in front, playing with the fuzzy dice. Their driver, a Chechen resplendent in the mammoth-woolly Chechen national hat, had eyes the color of tomato puree and looked ready to mash the tail end of any cardboard Polish Fiat that was traveling at less than the speed of sound. “Look,” Kostya said.

A series of broad, neoclassical facades, seamlessly attached one to the next, stretched to the right, cream-colored and placid despite a belligerent pair of watchtowers peeking out from behind. And in the center of the mélange, flying buttresses and spires spanned a sooty Gothic church that quite easily eclipsed the surrounding complex in presence and scale. “Jesus,” Vladimir said, his face pressed to the window. “What a beautiful mess.”

“Prava Castle,” said Kostya modestly.

To celebrate this unabashedly tourist moment, Vladimir lit one of the moldy local cigarettes that were presented to him by the Groundhog at the conclusion of lunch. He rolled down a window just as a pair of smiling M&M’s waved their white-gloved hands at him—the personable candies were welded to the side of a streetcar. “Ah!” Vladimir said as the old beast rumbled by. He looked back to the castle still scrolling on the right then back to the waving M&M’s disappearing on the left. He felt unconditionally happy. “Driver, play some music!” he said.

“ABBA’s greatest hits?” the fellow asked. It was a rhetorical question.

“Play ‘Super Trooper,’” Kostya said.

“Oh yes. I like that one,” Vladimir said. A sycamore-scented breeze blew through the car, as the Nordic cuties crooned off the tape deck and the three ex-Soviets bopped along in accents of varying quality. They began to descend, looping around the hill upon which the castle was perched, just as a tram swung the other way, missing them by centimeters. “Fucking Stolovans!” shouted the Chechen.

And then Vladimir looked down. He had picked up the expression “sea of spires” from some travel brochure back at the airport’s tourist office, and while there were certainly golden spires reflecting the late-summer sun in the architectural stew below, it seemed rather partial of the pamphlet to fail to mention the sloping red roofs landsliding down the hill and into the gray bend of water that Kostya pointed out as the Tavlata River. Or the enormous pale-green domes on both sides of the river capping massive Baroque churches. Or the tremendous Gothic powder towers, strategically spread out along the cityscape, like dark medieval guards protecting the town from the usual nonsense that had managed to consume so many European skylines throughout the years.

There was only one incongruous structure, giant and brooding in the background, but it single-handedly managed to cast a shadow over half the city. At first, Vladimir suspected it was an oversized powder tower blackened from years of use… Only… Well… No, one could no longer deny the painful truth. The structure was a kind of giant shoe, a galosh, to be exact. “What is it?” Vladimir shouted to Kostya over ABBA.

“What? You’ve never heard of the Foot?” Kostya shouted back. “It’s quite a funny story, Vladimir Borisovich. Should I tell it?”

“Please, Konstantin Ivanovich,” Vladimir said. He had forgotten how he knew Kostya’s patronymic, but this salt-of-the-earth man was surely the son of an Ivan.

“Well, as soon as the war ended, you see, the Soviets built the world’s tallest statue of Stalin over Prava. It was really something. The entire Old Town was just sandwiched between Stalin’s two feet; it’s amazing he didn’t step on it.” Kostya rewarded his own joke with a little laughter. How he relished speaking to Vladimir! It was obvious to the latter that had Kostya been born in a saner time, a different country, he could easily have been a beloved schoolteacher in some gentle, slow-witted province.

“Then, after the Great One passed on,” Kostya continued, regaining his official didactic tone, “the Stolovans were allowed to blow off his head and replace it with Khrushchev’s, which, I’m sure was a great consolation. Finally, two years after the Gabardine Revolution, the Stolovans managed to dynamite most of Nikita, but… Well, don’t ask me exactly what happened… Suffice to say, the fellows who won the Left Foot contract were last seen in St. Bart’s with Trata Poshlaya. Remember her? She was in Come Home, Rifleman Misha, and, oh, what was the one set in Yalta? My Albatross.”

“PravaInvest could dynamite the Foot,” Vladimir volunteered, momentarily forgetting his corporation’s unbearable lightness of being.

“It’s very costly,” Kostya cautioned him. “The Foot is right at the base of the Old Town. If you don’t use the explosives just right, you’ll blow half the city into the Tavlata.”

If PravaInvest couldn’t do it, then Vladimir vowed to mentally erase the Foot from his line of sight, even as it imposed its galosh-like shadow over the architectural grace of the cityscape.

Yes, giant foot aside, Prava continued to do its golden act beneath him, and then it dawned on Vladimir that this Prava was not without its charm; that while it was no Weltstadt like, say, Berlin, it was no shitty Bucharest either. Consequently, what if the Americans here were more the sophisticated Fran-and-Tyson variety than the deluded Baobab kind? Vladimir’s stomach grumbled with worry. Kostya, as if he had sensed Vladimir’s concerns, said: “A pretty town, yes? But New York must be still more beautiful.”

“Are you joking?” Vladimir said. They skipped a series of red lights and careened onto the tram rails of a bridge connecting the two parts of the city. Sparks flew and their driver cursed the Stolovans once more for their bloody infrastructure.

“Well,” said Kostya, ever the diplomat, “but New York must be bigger.”

“That’s right,” Vladimir said. “It’s the biggest.” But he was not reassured.

They swerved off the embankment and into a street lined with stately Baroque dwellings in various stages of disrepair yet still wearing their ornamentation, their gables and coats of arms standing out like the flounces on a worn Hapsburg gown.

“Stop here,” Kostya said. The driver slammed into the nearest stretch of sidewalk.

Outside, Vladimir did a little dance of happiness, a sort of cross between the jitterbug and the kazachok, feeling he could trust Kostya with this momentary lapse of reason. The Russian smiled sympathetically and said, “Yes, it’s a beautiful day.”

They found a café, one of the many from which white plastic tables reached out to the sidewalk, the tables covered with pork, dumplings, beer, and surrounded by Germans. Indeed, there were tourists everywhere. The Germans formed entire phalanxes of cheerful, drunk Swabians and purposefully striding Frankfurters. Teams of dazed Munich grandmothers on church trips staggered out of pubs to trample the yapping dachshunds being walked by their angry Stolovan counterparts: the babushkas. Upon first sight of them, Vladimir felt a kinship with these wizened survivors of both fascism and communism, whose city was clearly no longer their own, and who stared contemptuously from inside their meager headscarves at their bejeweled neighbors from across the border. He could easily picture his own grandmother in their place, except she would never consent to owning a hungry dog, preferring instead to feed her son extra portions.

But the Germans, although ubiquitous, were not alone. Clusters of stylish young Italians glided down the boulevard, trailing Dunhill smoke in their wake. A knot of Frenchwomen with identical buzz-cuts stood before a café menu, eyeing it skeptically. And finally Vladimir heard the sing-along of an American family, large and solid, arguing over whose turn it was to carry the goddamn video camera. “But where are the young Americans?” he said to Kostya.

“The young ones don’t take the tourist route too often. Although you do see them on the Emanuel Bridge, singing and begging for money.”

“We don’t want the basket cases,” Vladimir said.

“Well, I do know of a popular expatriate café for you,” Kostya said, “but first we should celebrate your arrival with a drink. Yes?”

Yes. They picked up the drinks menu. “My God,” Vladimir said, “fifteen crowns for a cognac.”

Kostya explained to him how that amounted to fifty cents.

A dollar was thirty crowns? Two drinks for a dollar? “Yes, of course,” said Vladimir Girshkin, the all-knowing international businessman. “Allow me to treat you,” he added magnanimously. And he took it further, thinking: at an allowance of two thousand dollars a week, he could budget four thousand drinks for himself. Of course, he couldn’t get too greedy, he would have to buy a lot of people a lot of booze, and then there were taxis and dinners and whatnot, but still, five hundred drinks a week was not such an unreasonable figure.

A waiter, his face as droopy as a dachshund’s, wearing the familiar oversized purple jacket and a Prussian mustache, dragged himself over to their table. “Dobry den’,” he said. It was the same greeting as in Russian, Vladimir noted cheerfully. But then Kostya said a mouthful of words that only vaguely resembled the Russian version of “Can we have two cognacs, please.”

They drank. A group of Italian schoolgirls marched down the street, waving some sort of crowing-rooster puppets at them. A pair of the bronze nymphs took their time passing by Kostya and Vladimir’s table, looking at each of them in turn with their great round eyes two shades darker than the cognac. The embarrassed Russians quickly turned away to face each other, then snuck furtive glances as the Italian girls rounded the corner. “So you said you had a relationship with an extraordinary American woman in New York,” Kostya said, his voice atremble.

“Several women,” Vladimir said nonchalantly. “But one was better than the others, as I suppose is always the case.”

“True,” said Kostya. “It has always been my dream to go to New York and find the nicest woman there and to live with her in a big house on the outskirts of town.”

“It’s always best to live in the center,” Vladimir corrected him, “and the nicest woman is hardly the most interesting. It’s a question of balance, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Kostya said, “but for children it’s best to find someone nice, and to hell with the rest.”

“Children?” Vladimir said and laughed.

“Sure, I’ll be twenty-eight next spring,” Kostya said. “Look,” he bent his head forward and pulled at the gray hairs clumped together at the center of his crown. “Now, of course, I would like a woman who will go with me to the symphony and the museum, and, if she insists, to the ballet. And she should be well-read, too, and like children, of course. And be able to keep house, for I’d like a big house, as I’ve said. But this is not too much to expect from a beautiful American woman such as the one you described, I don’t think.”

Vladimir smiled politely. He raised two fingers to the passing waiter and pointed at their empty glasses. “So have you anyone in Petersburg?” he said.

“My mother. She’s all alone. My father’s dead. She’s dying slowly. Cirrhosis. Emphysema. Dementia. Her pension comes out to thirteen dollars a month. I send her half my paycheck, but I still worry. Maybe I should move her out here someday.” And here Kostya sighed the familiar sigh of Vladimir’s Russian clients at the Emma Lazarus Society; the lung-emptying sigh that comes with a lead weight attached to the neck. The flaxen-haired gangster had gone quite soft on his mama.

“Do you ever think of going back to Russia?” Vladimir said, wishing instantly he could retract those words because the last thing he wanted was for Kostya to leave.

“Every day,” Kostya said. “But I could never find anything in Petersburg or Moscow that pays quite so much. The mafiya is certainly over there…” Kostya paused, as they both reflected upon that single, unmentionable word. “But it’s much more dangerous. Everyone’s ready to reach for their guns. Here, things are calmer, the Stolovans are better at keeping order.”

“Yes, the Groundhog certainly seems like a pleasant individual,” Vladimir said. “I doubt that there’s anyone bent on causing him harm. Or his associates.”

Kostya laughed, twisting his tie around his fingers like a little boy given his first clip-on. “Are you trying to ask me something?” he said. A second, uninvited round of cognacs had arrived. “Truthfully, there are some Bulgarians who aren’t terribly happy about how he’s cornered the high end of the strippers’ market, but these are just little grudges that can be solved with a few bottles of this…” He lifted his glass. “No need for the bullets.”

“None,” Vladimir said.

Kostya looked to his watch. “I must go to a meeting,” he said. “But we should do this regularly. Oh, and also, do you run?”

“Run?” Vladimir said. “Like to catch a bus?”

“No, to build physical endurance.”

“I don’t have any physical endurance,” Vladimir said.

“Well, it’s settled then. Next week we’ll go running. There’s a nice little trail in back of the compound.” They shook hands, and Kostya wrote down directions to the expatriate place on a napkin. It was called Eudora Welty’s. Then, true to form, the energetic young man got up and ran down the street, rounding the corner in no time.

Vladimir yawned spectacularly, finished off his cognac, then waved the waiter over for the bill, which came out to a little over three dollars. It was time to meet the Gringos.

20. THE WRITER COHEN

BY THE TIME he found the subterranean Eudora’s, Vladimir was already lost in the vast gastronomical abyss between lunch and dinner. Six souls remained in the restaurant’s cavernous digs, which suggested the place was once something other than the Cajun expat emporium it had become—perhaps a torture chamber where Catholics and Hussites hanged each other by the nose hairs from the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Now the only sign of tortured religiosity was the one advertising seared monkfish on a bed of fennel.

A waitress came to meet Vladimir. She was young, nervous, American, with a short, grizzly haircut, and dressed in some kind of kilt. She had the bad manners to call Vladimir “hon,” as in “Have a seat, hon.” She was Southern, too.

Vladimir perused the menu and his compatriots in late dining. To his immediate left was a table of four women and a dozen empty beer bottles. The women were dressed for the seventy-degree weather in engineer boots, corduroys, and T-shirts of various gloomy hues: hospital dun, narcolepsy gray, the black of the void. They talked so softly that Vladimir was unable to catch a single word despite their proximity, and they all looked terribly familiar, as if they had gone to Vladimir’s Midwestern college. He felt the urge to sneeze out the school’s name to see if he would get a response.

The remaining customer was a beautiful fellow: slender and pale, broad-shouldered and leonine with a bell-curve mane of heavy light-brown hair that was surely the sign of a healthy organism. If scholars of beautiful people could raise any objections to this gentleman it might be the slightly aquiline nose—what does the lion need of the eagle?—and also the awkward fuzz covering his chin that made it possible to imagine his physiognomy with either a real beard or no beard, but certainly not with this sad moss.

The fellow was scribbling away in a notepad, the requisite empty beers were lined up on the table, his cigarette was on autopilot, smoking away in the grooves of the ashtray, and now and again his gaze would travel the restaurant, casually brushing past the table populated by the opposite sex.

Vladimir ordered a dish of pit-barbecued pork and a mint julep. “And what’s the beer everyone’s drinking here?” he asked the waitress.

“Unesko,” she said and smiled. He had betrayed himself as a newcomer.

“Yes, one of those too.”

He rummaged his satchel for his thick, shaggy notebook, a holdover from college: a poem here, a stab at fiction there. He threw it down so that its spine would ring against the table, then did his best to seem impervious to the stares of the women’s table and the young Hemingway across the room. He took out his marble Parker, embossed with the logo of Mother’s corporation, and he smiled at it. Or rather, to it.

To those who have observed Vladimir throughout the years, it would have appeared his standard smile, the weight of it sunk into his jutting lower lip and the hazy, peaceful green eyes. But Vladimir (through reading too many bad novels, perhaps) believed that a smile could convey an entire story if only he sighed and shook his head with good humor at the right moments. In the instant case, Vladimir hoped this smile would say, “Yes, we have been through a lot together, this pen and I. We have kept each other from falling apart through all the strange, self-inflicted years. Portland, Oregon; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; then, of course, Sedona, Arizona. Maybe Key West. Hard to remember. Lots of barely functioning cars, women who didn’t care, bands that fell apart because the personalities involved were just too strong. And through it all: the pen. Writing. I am a writer. No, a poet.” He had heard that poetry had cachet here. Everybody was rhyming, jazz clubs were branching out into poetry slams. But then he had to distinguish himself… “I am a writer-poet. No, a novelist-poet. But for a living I make investments. A novelist-poet-investor. Plus I do dance improv.”

Vladimir was smiling at his pen for too long now. Enough with the pen already. He lowered himself into a poem. It was a poem about Mother; it came easy, Mother lent herself well to verse. His two drinks arrived and the waitress smiled at his efforts. Yes, they were all in this together.

He was making good time, describing how his mother looked in a Chinese restaurant, using such imagery as “a small string of pearls from her birthland,” which had scored good marks from a comparative literature professor back at the Midwestern college. Then tragedy struck. His globetrotting pen ran out. Vladimir shook it as gracefully as he could, then started aheming to the Eudora Welty’s other artist-in-dining. The fellow would not respond, lost (or pretending to be lost) in work, he narrowed his eyes and shook his head at the words before him as if they were his undoing. He bunched up his mane with both hands then let it unravel—it unraveled very elegantly, like a Chinese fan. He sighed and shook his head with good humor.

The women’s collective, however, responded by hushing their already subsonic conversation. They looked at Vladimir and his pen with great mystery and worry as if they were lost tourists confronted with a spontaneous native dance on a street far from the safety of their Hilton. Vladimir picked up his beer, his sole credential, and walked over to the women. “Pen?” he said.

One woman had a purse; she opened it and tore through a ream of facial tissues, new and used. She stole frightened glances at her compatriots until one of them—the blond spikes of her porcupine-cut bristling with authority—spoke up for her: “She doesn’t have a pen.” The others nodded.

“You need a pen?” It was the writer. He had pressed his lager against his cheek, which Vladimir took to be an international symbol of good will by way of mild inebriation.

“I need a pen,” Vladimir said, feeling the drama was about to come to a head. He crossed over to the writer mumbling thanks to the women for their effort (no response), and accepted a ballpoint. “Damn thing ran out,” Vladimir said.

“A writer carries two!” the writer barked. “Always.” He put the beer down and, with his round and cratered chin held high, appraised Vladimir as would a grade school principal his most bumbling charge.

“That one ran out too,” Vladimir said, although his strained voice pronounced him guilty—guilty of packing only one pen. “I’ve been writing too much today.”

Too much writing? Too much was never enough. Now it seemed for certain his idiocy would do him in, but instead the writer said: “Write anything good?”

“This poem about my Russian mother in Chinatown,” Vladimir said, trying to exoticize himself with as many ethnic references as possible. “But I’m just not getting it right. I came here, came to Prava, to get enough distance and I’m still lost.”

“How’d you get a Russian mother?” the writer asked.

“I am Russian.”

“Shhh.” They looked around. “The barmaid is Stolovan,” the writer explained.

A pair of uneven saloon doors separated the bar area from the rest of the joint; the Russophobic Stolovan was somewhere behind those doors. Vladimir looked down to his feet in embarrassment and took a swig of his beer in lieu of something to say. Yes, he was definitely starting to lose ground with all the fits and starts afflicting his attempts at conversation with the literary god. He decided, against his best instincts, to take a stab at honesty, that mortal enemy of the pyramid schemer. “I just got here,” he said. “I’m still a little out of it as far as the locals go.”

“Forget about them,” the writer said. “This is an American town. Why don’t you sit down? Come on, take a break from your Russian mommy poem for a second. Oh, don’t look so sore. Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage. Trust me, the maternal teat will still be there tomorrow morning.”

And then Vladimir knew he was going to like this guy. The helpful instructions about always having two pens, the worldly attitude toward the Stolovans, and now the learned appraisal of the maternal teat, all confirmed that the writer was what the uninitiated would call an asshole. But Vladimir knew these pretty castoffs of well-to-do America, cruising along on their five-year plan of alcoholic self-discovery, then trolling desperately for a five-year renewal option. Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage. What disarming aggression. It was Midwestern progressive college redux, confirmation that this Adonis was definitely in Vladimir’s cards, his “Patient Zero.”

Vladimir took a seat just as a second mint julep was brought out by the waitress, smiling soberly at her countrymen’s meeting of the minds. Vladimir polished off his first beer and placed it on the outgoing tray. “Another?” she said.

“Please.”

“Nuts?”

“No nuts.”

“Lemon?”

“Sans lemon.”

“On me,” said the writer, impressed by the brevity, the honesty of the exchange. Now they were in Raymond Carver territory. “Drinking up a storm?” he said to Vladimir as the latter reached for the julep.

“Jet lag. I’m out of it,” Vladimir said. Think. Carver dialogue. Deceptively simple yet profound. “I haven’t got it all together yet,” Vladimir said, as he looked away mysteriously.

“You find a place to live?”

“My boss gave me a flat in the suburbs.”

“Boss?” The writer’s mouth came open revealing Yankee orthodontia at its best. He shook his head, his mane rippling; it felt very natural to just reach out and touch the silky thing. “You mean you got a job? With whom?”

The iconoclast scribbler seemed to perk up nicely at this mention of the material world. Vladimir imagined a background of worried parents, angry transatlantic phone calls, pouches full of law-school applications being dragged through the streets of Prava by exhausted Stolovan postmen. “A development firm,” Vladimir said.

“Development firm? What are you developing? My name’s Perry, by the way.” He stuck out a hand. “Perry Cohen. Yes, it’s a surprising name. I’ll have you know that I’m the only Iowa Jew ever.”

Vladimir smiled, thinking: what happens if there’s another Iowa Jew in the room when he introduces himself as the sole specimen? The embarrassment! He filed that one away for future leverage. “How’d you Jews get all the way out to Iowa?” he asked. (“I’m a Jew, too,” he added for reassurance.)

“My father’s the Jew,” Perry explained. “My mother’s the mayor’s daughter.”

“And the mayor let her marry a Jew. How nice.” There. He was catching the vibe. The expat, in-your-face vibe. “Your father must be blond like you. And assimilated, too.”

“He’s Hitler with a circumcision,” Cohen said. And as he said it, something uncalled for, perhaps even unscripted, took place: his head bent forward so that his mane naturally covered his face, and beneath the mane Vladimir noticed—what? A quick nasal exhalation to forestall a whimper? A rapid blinking of the eyes to shoo away the moisture? Teeth biting hard into a quivering lip to bring it back in line? But before Vladimir had a chance to ponder the question of whether this was a true display of emotion or a performance for his benefit, Cohen brushed his hair back, ahemed loudly, and regained his composure.

“Hitler, yes,” Vladimir said, eager to appear blithely unconcerned. “Do tell.”

And so Cohen told Vladimir the story of his father. The two men had known each other for two minutes now; a pen had been transferred from one to the other; ethnic backgrounds had been established; a few sallies had been launched. Was that all it took—the equivalent of two dogs sniffing out each other’s rear—to get the writer Cohen to tell the story of his father?

Could this story have been Cohen’s trademark then? His theme? One thing Vladimir had learned from his years of wandering and self-invention was that it was important to have a theme. A coherent story you could riff off when the opportunity presented itself. A chance to more firmly establish yourself in other people’s minds. Cohen’s story, ironically enough, wasn’t even his own; it was his father’s. But Cohen was desperately trying to make it his own.

He even had visual aids to help him along! A Polaroid of his father, an especially pink and heavy American Jew, tiny eyes partly covered by an enormous brow drenched in sweat, the rest of him stuffed into a green checkered suit, his arm around Richard Nixon in front of a sign reading, “Des Moines Business Caucus—1974.” Both men smiling at each other as if this was not 1974 but just another undistinguished year in the course of the American presidency.

“Da-ddy,” Cohen said, rubbing his thumb on his father’s bald dome, aping the voice of a three-year-old. And quite a papa he was. On Perry’s thirteenth birthday, when, according to Hebrew scripture, Perry was supposed to be saddled with the dubious responsibilities of manhood, his father presented him with a gift. “I’m changing your name,” his father declared. “You shouldn’t have to go through life as a Cohen.” He gave his son a ream of paperwork to sign. His name would now be Perry Caldwell.

Now, Cohen had had intimations of this self-hate business before. He was named Perry, after all. On high holy days, the only times when his father would take Perry into faraway St. Louis for services, he would make a habit of referring to the rabbi as Reverend Lubofsky. “Hope the Reverend lays off the Gipper this year,” he’d say, crumpling his big, sad, fleshy-lipped face in frightened anticipation of any Iowa local seeing them pull into the little synagogue’s parking lot.

And so Cohen found himself at the progressive Midwestern liberal arts college (a sister institution to the one Vladimir attended), a college where communal father-hatred was the norm, and where Cohen excelled particularly. In the early nineties the school also served as a kind of way station for hundreds of unhappy Midwestern young men and women on their way to the redemptive land of Prava. Cohen, angry and confused, took the cue by junior year. And here he was.

SO THAT WAS his story! That was Cohen’s theme! His father was a rich asshole. How shocking. Vladimir was ready to attack Cohen with his own background, from the Jew-baiting of Leningrad to his years as a Stinky Russian Bear in Westchester. Assimilation, my ass. What do you know of assimilation, spoiled American pig? Why, I’ll show you… I’ll show you all!

Oh, and the way Cohen had told the story. Lowering his voice during the bit about the Gipper, trying to sound hurt but brave when recalling his father’s transgressions. Crocodile tears, my suburban friend. Your father could be a deforester of forests and a murderer of Hutus, but in the end what determines your fate is the size of your trust fund, the slope of your nose, the quality of your accent. At least his daddy wasn’t accusing him of walking like a Jew. God damn it! Vladimir could just kill this Cohen! But instead he shook his head mournfully and said, “My God. It’s hard to believe such things can still happen in this day and age.”

“I can’t believe it either,” said Cohen. “I hope you don’t mind me sharing it with you.” My sharing it with you, Vladimir mentally corrected him (idiot Americans didn’t even know their own language). And no, as long as there was hard currency down the road, he did not mind.

“My relationship with my father is something that really informs my work,” Cohen continued. “And I thought you’re the kind of person…”

Oh? What kind of person was he?

“You seem very wise and world-weary.”

“Ah,” Vladimir said. Wise and world-weary. Well he got that right, the son of a bitch. But then the supercilious Girshkin softened a little. Come to think of it, wise and world-weary was possibly the kindest thing you can say to a twenty-five-year-old. And then the Iowan was, as we have said, a big, attractive fella, a grungy lion (if only Vladimir could look more like him), confident enough of himself to share his intimacies over the course of a single beer. Plus, he had nice, heavy rural hands, the hands of a man, and had probably slept with all kinds of women. Vladimir, too, had designs on manhood, and to that end, Vladimir wanted to be Cohen’s friend. The need for friendship and closeness was not something Vladimir imagined would rekindle so soon after his ignominious flight from the States, but it was certainly there; Vladimir was still a social animal with the need to rub up against fellow creatures. And he had before him this lion. This goofy wandering beast.

Cohen finished by asking Vladimir if he could see his mother poem. “It’s not ready yet,” Vladimir said. “I’m sorry.”

A long silence followed his apology. Cohen may have felt rebuffed after his own fifteen minutes of candor. But soon the pit-barbecued pork arrived and the waitress cleared her throat to remind them that they had a waitress.

“Oh, you never told me what your company develops,” Cohen said finally.

“Talent,” Vladimir said. “We develop talent.”

VLADIMIR AND COHEN walked off the pork as the sun prepared for its bedtime swoon into the river. Over the Emanuel Bridge they went to the tune of buskers playing saxophones behind Bata shoe boxes lined with velvet; a blind accordion player and his wife belting out German beer-hall songs with great aplomb and to the jingle of the largest coins; a rendition of Hamlet by a pair of peppy young California blondes drawing stares and whistles from young Stolovan men but little coinage from their embarrassed conationals. With all this low-tech commerce and entertainment, the bridge felt to Vladimir like the oldest crossing imaginable, a stone carpet unfurled from the castle overhanging the scene like a one-piece skyline. It was lined on both sides with statues of saints, grimy with coal dust and contorted into heroic positions. “Look,” Cohen said, pointing out three indistinct figures lost in the robes of two of the grander saints. “That’s the devil, that’s a Turk, and that’s a Jew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you read much?”

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

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

“Brodsky? Simic?”

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

“Oh,” Vladimir said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Kmart,” Cohen whispered with mock reverence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lowered her head conspiratorially and brushed her collarbone against Vladimir’s shoulder, so he could feel the immense weight of it, her body armor, her naturally occurring breastplate. “But personally I think the Stolovans were laughing at his name. Pstruch. It means ‘trout’ in Stolovan. Adolf Trout! It’s too much! Don’t you agree? Say, have you ever been trout-fishing? I know you Russians love to fish. I went fishing in the Carpathians with this French guy who knows Jitomir Melnik, the prime minister, and I just know the frog would be interested in your PravaInvest. Would you like me to introduce you? Would you like to have dinner? Or we could do lunch if you’re busy. Or, nowadays, I’m trying to wake up in time for breakfast.”

Yes, yes, yes. Yes on three counts, Vladimir thought. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then maybe we can take a nap together. No, best to keep her awake and talking. Her words, so soft, so light, the consistency of a flan… Vladimir wanted to reach over and eat her conversation. Follow it right into her little mouth. But, horror of horrors, Alexandra had a boyfriend, or what passed for one—a chubby Yorkshire fellow named Marcus who looked like he could have been a rugby player before all this Eastern Bloc a-go-go stuff happened. While Alexandra pleasantly queried Vladimir on his writing (“About your mother? Oh, how interesting!”), her boyfriend loudly attacked the café’s other patrons with his hip Briton-on-the-edge routine (Wot? Wot did you say? C’mere y’cunt!), eliciting forced laughter from Cohen and Plank. It was clear that everybody looked up to this Marcus runt; they looked up to him because he was dating Alexandra, the crown jewel of Prava.

Then there was Maxine, introduced as a student of American culture, dressed entirely in polyester and sweating accordingly in the warm caffeine haze of the Nouveau. Her short hair had been gelled into one blond upward-pointing clump that seemed ready to take off for the stars, and she had moist blue eyes that looked at everything, including Vladimir, with amazement. She was also a diplomatic conversationalist, talking to everyone in turn, first Cohen, then Plank, then Marcus, then Alexandra, then finally Vladimir. “I’m writing a treatise on the mythopoetics of Southern interstates,” she said to him. “Have you ever been?”

Vladimir liked her expressiveness and the warmth of her hand. He told her of his experiences with Midwestern interstates. How driving behind the wheel of his Chicagoan girlfriend’s Volvo in college he had nearly killed a family of chipmunks. It was a safe and pointless conversation, certainly safer than Vladimir’s driving, until gutsy Vladimir dared ask her why, as a self-proclaimed student of American culture, she was living in Prava. She lifted her latte to cover her mouth, and mumbled something about needing distance. Ah, good old distance.

Overall, Vladimir felt he scored well at the café portion of the popularity contest, despite Marcus and Plank’s uniting to grumble about rich little pissers, meaning, well, Vladimir. But Vladimir would not succumb. His mental reflexes, sharpened by the afternoon’s initial sparring with Cohen, saved the day once more as he announced what he planned to do with his riches. Why, of course, he was going to start a literary magazine. Cohen at first seemed offended at not being told of the endeavor beforehand, but soon the whispers of “lit mag” suffused the room and, before they knew it, the regulars at Cohen’s corner were doing their condescending best to shoo away the literary hopefuls at the gates.

Vladimir, still amazed at his own idea, played it down. How the hell was he going to sell this one to the Groundhog? But then he remembered that the students at his Midwestern college used to have not one but two literary magazines, so how hard would it be to start up a little press in Prava? Besides, they were already doing glossy brochures for the “company.” It wouldn’t take too much more to print up a few hundred copies of something half-decent on the side. “Does anyone have editorial experience?” he asked his new crowd. Of course they all did.

AFTER THEY HAD drunk enough coffee to keep them floating at an arm’s length from the ceiling for a week, the crew retired downstairs where a primitive-looking disco was pounding out something not entirely avant-garde. “How Cleveland,” sneered Plank at last year’s music, yet no one turned their backs on the scene (was there any alternative?), venturing instead to their own rickety side table, one of many bracketing the amorphously shaped dance floor. “Beer!” cried Maxine. And soon bottles of Unesko lined the table—an additional line of defense against the bodies moving without grace or surety in the revolving police-car beams and the lethargically thumping strobe lights. “This is all we have,” Plank said to Vladimir, Vladimir having clearly grown on him since the announcement of the literary magazine. “I hope you weren’t expecting New York on the Tavlata.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do about that,” said the emboldened Vladimir. “Yes, we shall see.”

Alexandra was tugging on his ear, anxious to give him a census of the place. “Look at the backpackers! Look how big they are! Oh, that frat-hog with the Ohio State T-shirt! Oh, he’s priceless!”

“What’s their function?” Vladimir said.

“None,” Cohen said, wiping beer off his chin. “They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushkas like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus.”

“And where are our people?” Vladimir shouted to Alexandra above the din.

She pointed around to the back tables, which, Vladimir now realized, were reserved for their fellow artists, slopping beer calmly amid the suburban feeding-frenzy.

An ambassador from one of those tables, a tall young buck in a Warhol T-shirt, brought a sleek blue water pipe filled with hashish. Vladimir was now introduced as “magnate, talent scout, poet laureate, and publisher.” They smoked the sweet and peppery hash, refilling the pipe enough times for their fingers to become brown and sticky, for this was the moist and lethal kind of hash that could only result from Turkey’s proximity. The fellow offered it to Vladimir for six hundred crowns a gram, but Vladimir was too tweaked to deal with both crowns and the metric system. He bought two thousand dollars’ worth anyway and made another lifelong friend in the process.

There was little he would remember after the hashish entered the picture. There was the dancing with Maxine and Alexandra and possibly the boys. A wide swath of floor was cleared of backpackers by brown-shirted disco personnel, and Vladimir’s crowd was invited to get up and boogie. At this point a serious fracas broke out. A sorority sister crying foul jumped on Vladimir, of all people. Stoned beyond capacity, Vladimir thought he was being romanced, what with all that sweet-smelling American flesh around him and a pair of manicured claws dug into his sides. Only when Alexandra started to drag the sister off by the hair did Vladimir realize that he was at the center of some kind of class antagonism.

She did this hair-pulling with aplomb and Vladimir, free of his burden, must have thanked her profusely because he remembered her saying “Aww” in the purple-gray-green haze of disco lights and hash smoke, and kissing him on both cheeks. Then he felt good about the whole clumsy incident since it had further polarized the crowd into “us” versus “them” and in the space of one short evening he had placed himself squarely in the “us” column of the register.

Then, sometime during the taxi ride up to his compound, he remembered poking the dozing Cohen and trying to point out the city below, its floodlights put out, but the yellow moon still traveling along the bend of the Tavlata, the airplane warning lights blinking off the cuff of the Foot, a lone Fiat huffing its way past the silent embankment. “Perry, look at how beautiful,” Vladimir said.

“Yes, good,” said Cohen and fell back asleep.

Finally, he was looking up at the walls of his panelak castle, remembering how imposing Casa Girshkin had seemed during the high school days of returning from Manhattan late at night, intoxicated, incoherent, and unresponsive to his ever-vigilant mother’s queries in both Russian and English. He walked into the lobby where Gusev’s men had fallen asleep, some with their playing cards still in their hands. Empowered by the smell of the lobby, he crawled upstairs in search of his bed, missing his floor twice. At last he found his room, then his bed.

She was a pretty one—Alexandra, he thought, before sprinkling himself with minoxidil and quietly passing out.

21. PHYSICAL CULTURE AND HER ADHERENTS

NOBODY WOKE HIM up. Ever. Not only had Vladmir forgotten to pack his alarm clock but the Groundhog and the human tentacles of his vast apparatus were apparently still nice and cozy in bed with their girlfriends and rifles till well into the afternoon. Kostya, it turned out, spent his mornings in church.

Vladimir found out this ecclesiastical tidbit on his fifth Prava day. He woke up late to what might have been an explosion at one of the Paleolithic-era factories lying low against the velvet horizon, but it could have very well been an explosion within Vladimir himself—last evening’s pivo and vodka and schnapps had arranged themselves as unfortunate bedmates in his stomach and Vladimir was forced to heave all over the sterility of his prefab bathroom, the lecherous peacock grinning knowingly from the shower curtain. Vladimir noticed the fowl had on a tight pair of boxer shorts in the hues of the Stolovan tricolor and had an avian bulge to boot.

The previous night, the third installment of the Café Nouveau saga, had left Vladimir gripping for the side of his body where he imagined his liver lived out its troubled existence, and so he put on a New York Sports Club T-shirt (they had canvassed the Emma Lazarus Society for membership—as if anyone had the money!) with the vain hope that he could be made fit by the power of suggestion. He walked down to the empty Kasino, hoping Marusya, the perpetually drunk old lady behind the counter, was dispensing cigarettes and her special hangover brew. She was not.

Kostya, however, was there, wearing a jogging suit fluorescent enough to put the peacock to shame, and a heavy gold chain with cross and anatomically correct Jesus weighing down nearly to his stomach. “Vladimir! What a beautiful day! Have you been outside?”

“Have you seen Marusya?”

“You don’t need her on a day like today,” Kostya said, tugging at his Christ. “Give your lungs a break, I say.” He looked closely at Vladimir’s T-shirt, until it appeared to Vladimir that his scrawny self was under examination and he hunched forward his shoulders in defense. “Sports club,” read Kostya out of sequence. “New York.”

“It was a gift.”

“No, you’re very lean, you must jog.”

“I’m just naturally a very healthy man.”

“Come with me,” Kostya said. “There’s space behind the houses. We’ll jog. You’ll build lower-body strength.”

Lower body? Meaning what—below his mouth? What kind of talk was this? Of course, his Chicagoan girlfriend back in the Midwestern college had made him run around a very sophisticated, computer-monitored field—their school’s concession to its athletic fringe-element. “You’ll thank me for this someday,” his former girlfriend used to say. Aha. Thank you, darling. Thank you for the gift of pain and sweat.

But then Kostya placed one of his beautiful paws, fingernails carefully trimmed, on Vladimir’s shoulder and led him out like a rebellious cow that had taken too much to the dank, moldy confines of her barn, into the hazy sunshine and sickly grass of early-autumn Prava.

Here it was very dacha-like: weeping willows wept under the weight of the tetra-hydro-petra-carbo whatever-the-hell-it-was being belched out of the smokestacks; postcommunist rabbits bounced about lethargically as if fulfilling some demented party directive nobody had bothered to rescind; and Kostya beamed like a farmer glad to be back after selling grain in the city. He unzipped his jogging suit to reveal a chest bereft of hair, and said things like “oooh,” “bozhe moi,” and “we’re in God’s country now.”

There was a clearing. An oval path of sand had been splashed about, probably by the jogging enthusiast himself, and the sun, free of the willows, burnt down upon the scene mercilessly. If there is a hell on this earth… thought Vladimir to himself, covering his burning head with his palm in an effort to prevent the minoxidil from burning off, if such a thing was possible. Now what?

“To stand around is pointless!” shouted Kostya, negating centuries of Russian peasant wisdom, and then began to run like a madman around the sandy path. “Onward! Onward!”

Vladimir lamely broke into a trot. There was something one had to do with the arms; he looked to Kostya who was raising dust across the field and tried to purposefully strike the air, left, right, left, right. Christ. Perhaps he should have finished college just to avoid this madness. But then college graduates were often conscripted to play racquetball in Wall Street gyms. Although there was always social work… for quiet people who liked the shade.

He went around, three years added to his life per every lap completed. He grasped for the thin Stolovan air. He felt sweat as thick as shampoo separating his skin-’n’-rib body from his flimsy cotton tee. He felt globs of mucus coagulate in his defective lungs while he hobbled from one foot to the next like one of those awkward Floridian birds.

Kostya slowed down to keep pace with him. “So? Do you feel it?”

“D… Da,” Vladimir affirmed.

“You feeling good?”

“D… Da.”

“Better than ever?”

Vladimir cringed and waved his arms to indicate his inability to talk. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” hollered his tormentor. “Now, which Greek said that?”

Vladimir shrugged. Zorba? Couldn’t be. “Socrates, I think,” shouted Kostya. He sped ahead of Vladimir as if to show him how it could be done. Soon he disappeared completely. Vladimir panted. His eyes were clouded over with tears, his pulse was going faster than the Fan Man’s fan set to HIGH. Then the sandy path disappeared also. It got dark, maybe there was a cloud overhead. There was the crunch of grass and twigs. There was a shout of “Hey.” He hit something hard with his head.

VLADIMIR’S THROAT PASSED a ball of phlegm the size of a frog. He looked at it lying next to him in the grass. Kostya was dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. “So you ran into a tree,” he said. “No big deal. The tree’s all right. You just got a dash of blood here. We have American Band-Aids in the house. Gusev’s men go through them like vodka.”

Vladimir blinked a couple of times then tried to flip himself over. This resting-under-a-tree part was nice, much better than running around in the sun. Did he feel stupid? Not at all—varsity sports weren’t on his résumé. Maybe now the idiot Kostya would leave him alone to his asthma and his alcohol. “Okay, so we’ll start out slow next time,” Kostya said. “I see we have some limitations.”

We? Vladimir tried to beam disgust into the madman’s face, but it was too busy looking all sweet and puffy, while the hands carefully worked his wound as if Vladimir were Kostya’s best buddy brought down at Stalingrad. Vladimir pictured this scene on a recruiting poster entitled: “You’re in the mafiya now!”

“Right,” Vladimir said. “Start out slow next time. Maybe we’ll do some…” He could think of no Russian equivalent to power-walking. “We’ll lift some light weights or something.”

“I got those,” Kostya said. “Light and heavy, however you like them. But my guess is you need to develop your cardiovascular system.”

“No, I think I need to lift some very light weights,” Vladimir said, but there was no arguing with Kostya. They would run slowly around the track while bearing light weights every noon on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. “The other days I’m in church,” explained Kostya.

“Of course you are,” Vladimir said, staring blankly at his own blood flowing dark and somber against the outrageous pinks and violets of Kostya’s jumpsuit. Fuck him. But he had one thought: “Isn’t church only on Sunday?”

“I help out in the mornings on Wednesday and Friday,” explained the cherub. “They have a very small Russian Orthodox community here and they really need a lot of help. My family, you see, has very strong religious roots going back to before the revolution. We’ve had priests, deacons, monks…”

“Oh, my grandfather was a deacon,” said the absentminded Vladimir.

And that was how he got himself invited to church.

ON THE AMERICAN front, things were moving. When the afternoons of loafing around the compound, pretending to develop a business strategy and learn the local language exhausted themselves, Vladimir, along with Jan, the youngest, least mustached of all the Stolovan drivers, flew past the castle down to the golden city. The BMW assigned to him, Vladimir learned, was not of the top class such as the ones requisitioned by Gusev and some of his direct subordinates and, of course, the Groundhog who had two Beamers, one with a fixed roof, the other a convertible. Vladimir learned a lot about cars from Jan, on whom he would also practice his Stolovan. While his new friend derailed trams and scared the living crap out of dachshunds and babushkas alike, Vladimir learned to say: “This car is bad. There’s no five-disc CD changer.” And, alternatively: “You have a face that is attractive to me. Come inside my nice car.”

His web expanded from Eudora Welty’s and the Nouveau to the Air Raid Shelter, the Boom Boom Room, Jim’s Bar, and even, after one mistaken foray, Club Man. There were whispers:

“That’s the publisher, the new one.”

“He’s the talent scout. For that multinational. PravaInvest.”

“The novelist, you must have heard of him… Sure, he’s published all over the place.”

“I’ve seen him with Alexandra! She asked me to light her cigarette at the Nouveau once…”

“We should buy him a Unesko.”

“My God, he’s sneering our way.”

In the course of it all, Vladimir had developed a solid, workmanlike crush on Alexandra. He looked all over her undeniably accomplished body, whenever her eyes scanned the menu, the beer list, the wine list, or were somehow otherwise engaged, then brought the little slips of memory back to his panelak where by night they fueled his dreams, by day provided contemplation: her lips, soft and maraschino-red against the gray-brick backdrop of the Old Town Hall; breast seen from above, overhanging a square marble table; long tanned arms reaching out constantly to embrace some local celebrity, press him into her signature raised clavicle. It was nothing heavy, like it had been with Francesca. Just a refreshingly honest (albeit pathetic) and sexually-affirming thing to do, and he went about doing it methodically. He asked her to lunch, but to allay any suspicion of his romantic intentions he had to ask all of them in turn, and frequently Marcus accompanied her. These were business lunches where nothing got accomplished, ideas for the magazine were pushed around like mah-jongg tiles, but ultimately it was the gossip and who-bedded-who crap that was published breathlessly in the sweet and smoky café air. Alexandra, sadly, bedded only Marcus, the rugby runt, who Vladimir learned was an asshole par excellence, but one that nipped and tugged at his own ass daily for the coveted spot of editor-in-chief.

“Oi, these fucks,” Marcus would say in a Cockney adopted from years of being physically big and artistically small in London’s West End, as he scanned the sourpussed patrons of the café/bar/disco/restaurant. “The next Hemingway they think they are.” And there was Marcus’s problem: he didn’t write. He acted, and, in an effort to bridge the gap between what he could do and what Prava wanted him to do, he had taken up painting and what Alexandra hopefully termed “the graphic arts.” Vladimir figured he’d slot him in for art editor, which would theoretically mean that Marcus would “edit” however many of his own pieces he wished, stick them into the damn thing, and call it a day.

For editor-in-chief Vladimir’s system of patronage telegraphed Cohen in both italics and bold print. Also for best friend, pal, buddy, that sort of thing. Cohen was indispensable. The nabobs liked him, Vladimir learned, because he stumbled and said absolutely wrong things like “faggot” and “gosh,” and he looked the part, too—this thick rural Iowan. At the same time, he was an angry and disdainful Jewish fellow, suspicious that the Midwestern mohel, short on practice, had taken a little too much of his wiener on the eighth day of his life, a crisis commensurate with being the supposedly sole Iowan Jew (not to mention one who had Hitler for a father), which proved once and for all that the world was out to get him, and so here he was in Prava, the edge of the known world.

He also was well connected up in Amsterdam and down in Istanbul, producing tiny packets par avion that were the finest in hydroponic science and Turkish know-how and led to many placid, indebted expressions on both sides of the Tavlata. Vladimir’s old friend Baobab, of course, was similarly occupied, but the fool across the ocean carried out his enterprise not out of social concern, but for crude, selfish profit (his stuff was notoriously full of seeds and twigs, too).

And let’s not forget that Cohen was Vladimir’s mentor, a position Cohen never failed to mention, as in “I’m mentoring Vladimir tomorrow,” and “We have a very satisfying mentorship.” It took place in the cramped Lesser Quarter alley where Cohen and Vladimir had first reached their literary understanding. Vladimir’s attempts to change the venue in favor of the gorgeous park that curved upward off the Lesser Quarter and apparently overlooked the castle itself, not to mention the Old and New Towns across the river, were futile. Too obvious for Cohen. “Creativity flourishes only in small, blighted spaces—janitor’s closets, cold-water flats, rabbit hutches…”

Why argue? They went over Cohen’s singular work (“And from the bedroom there’s the sound / of two lovers reading Ezra Pound”) as if they were rabbinical scholars finally granted access to the kabala, until one day Cohen said: “Vladimir, you’re in for a treat. There’s going to be a reading.”

In for a treat? Could one still say that in 1993? Vladimir, for one, wouldn’t gamble on it. “But I’m not ready to read yet,” he said.

“I know you’re not,” Cohen laughed. “I’m the one who’s reading. Oh, don’t look so sad, Grasshopper. Your time will come.”

“I see,” Vladimir said. But it was strangely disheartening to hear that he wasn’t ready to read, even though the arbiter of his worth was this mangy lion from the American interior. Vladimir knew he was no poet, but surely he wasn’t that bad.

“Three o’clock, tomorrow. Café Joy in the New Town, it’s a block from the Foot. Or we could just meet by the left toe. And Vlad…” Cohen put his arm around him, an action that frightened bashful Vladimir to this day. “There’s no dress code, of course, but I always make sure I wear something beautiful when I present myself to Joy society.”

THE JOY. VLADIMIR lay on his stomach in his little blond-wood boudoir, meditating on this fabled venue and his chance to impress the crowd with his own verse, to stamp his artistry onto the mass of wealthy English speakers, potential investors all, and to begin (finally!) Phase Two of the master plan.

Phase One had gone off without a hitch. He had introduced himself, nay, insinuated himself into this unpolished mass of Westerners on the cultural make. But now he had to clinch the deal. To prove to the likes of the dog-breeder Plank and the rugby runt Marcus, that he was not just a businessman out to buy some bohemian friends with a lit mag and a thousand free drinks. And if he could pull off a reading at the Joy, well then…On to Phase Three! The actual “take the donkeys for a ride” phase. (Hey, maybe he could even steal Alexandra from Marcus, somewhere around Phase Two-and-a-Half, say.)

In the meantime, PravaInvest stocks—engraved with all the flourishes and pomp of karate green-belt certificates for suburban tykes—had just been printed and were ready for sale at only U.S.$960 a pop. Discerning investors everywhere, take note.

And so, to work. He took out his notebook filled unimpressively with notes from Cohen’s tutelage and turned to the “Mother in Chinatown” poem that he had started that fateful day at Eudora Welty’s.

He read the first few lines of the Mother poem to himself. A small string of pearls from her birth land… Ludicrous, yes. But definitely of the moment.

On the other hand, what if…? What if Cohen and the whole Crowd saw right through him? What if they were baiting Vladimir to the Joy only to expose the international-magnate-talent-scout-poet-laureate-publisher for the shameless operator he really was? Vladimir sniffed the air around him, worried he was giving off a fraudulent odor. Sniff-sniff… Nothing but the smell of wet dust and the dizzying tang of an electrical fire next door. Furthermore, what if Cohen took umbrage at being upstaged at the reading? What if he united his minions—Marcus, Plank, that other emaciated guy, whatever his name was—and outflanked Vladimir for good? Whom could Vladimir summon on his own behalf? True, Alexandra might defend him, that nutty dear. Plus Alexandra had complete discretion over Marcus and was thoroughly worshipped by Maxine and that other blonde, the one who always wore hip-waders and carried a Chinese parasol… But that would only split the Crowd in half. What was he going to do with just half a Crowd?

If only someone competent could advise him.

If only Mother were here.

Vladimir sighed. There was no getting around it. He missed her. This was the first time that mother and son were separated by five thousand miles and the loss was palpable. For better or worse, Mother had run Vladimir like her own five-and-a-half-foot fief up to this point. Now that Vladimir had abandoned her, he was entirely on his own. Put differently, if you subtracted Mother from Vladimir, what had you? A negative number, by Vladimir’s calculations.

She had been with him from the bitter start. He remembered Mother the twenty-nine-year-old xylophone teacher dutifully preparing her asthmatic son for kindergarten, five months after school had started for the healthier children. The first day of class was a time of immeasurable anxiety for any Soviet toddler, but for half-dead Vladimir it was accompanied by the fear that his boisterous new chums would chase him around the schoolyard, push him down, sit on him, knock the last breath out of his battered chest. “Now, Seryozha Klimov is the hooligan,” Mother educated Vladimir. “He’s the tall one with the red hair. You will avoid him. He won’t sit on you, but he likes to pinch. If he tries to pinch you, tell Maria Ivanovna or Ludmila Antonovna or any other teacher, and I will run over and defend you. Your best friend will be Lionya Abramov. I think you played with him once in Yalta. He has a wind-up rooster. You can play with the rooster, but don’t get your shirtcuffs caught in the gears. You’ll ruin your shirt and the other children will think you’re a cretin.”

The next day, per Mother’s instructions, Vladimir found Lionya Abramov sitting in a corner, pale, trembling, a great green vein pulsing along his monumental Jewish forehead; in other words, a fellow sufferer. They shook hands like adults. “I have a book,” Lionya wheezed, “in which Lenin is in hiding and he builds a camouflaged tent out of nothing but grass and a horse’s tail.”

“I have one like that, too,” Vladimir said. “Let’s see yours.”

Lionya produced this particular volume. It was pretty, indeed, but, with its miniscule text, clearly meant for someone twice their age. Still Vladimir found it hard to resist coloring Lenin’s bald dome a proper shade of red. “You have to watch out for Seryozha Klimov,” Lionya informed him. “He might pinch you so hard you’ll bleed.”

“I know,” Vladimir said. “My mama told me.”

“Your mama’s very nice,” Lionya confessed shyly. “She’s the only one that makes sure they don’t hit me. She says we’re going to be best friends.”

A few hours later, lying on a mat during rest time, Vladimir embraced the tiny curled-up creature beside him, his first best buddy, just as Mother had promised. Maybe tomorrow they could go to the Piskaryovka mass grave together with their grandmothers and lay flowers for their dead. Maybe they would even be inducted into the Red Pioneers side by side. What good fortune that he and Lionya were so alike and that neither of them had siblings… Now they would have each other! It was as if Mother had created someone just for him, as if she had guessed how lonely he had been in his sick bed with his stuffed giraffe, the months spinning away in twilight gloom until it was June again, time to go down to sunny Yalta to watch the Black Sea dolphins jump for joy.

Wheezing along with his new pal, Vladimir hardly noticed that Mother had slipped into the room and was leaning over their prone bodies. “Ah, druzhki,” she whispered to them, a word meaning, roughly, “little friends,” a word Vladimir to this day considered one of the most tender of his youth. “Has anyone assaulted you yet?” she asked them.

“No one has touched us,” they whispered back.

“Good… Then get some rest,” she said, pretending they were battle-hardened comrades returning from the front. She gave them each a Little Red Riding Hood chocolate candy, as tasty a candy as one could hope for, and rolled them into a blanket. “I like your mama’s hair, the way it’s so black you can almost see yourself in it,” Lionya said thoughtfully.

“She is beautiful,” Vladimir agreed. His mouth coated with chocolate, he went to sleep and dreamt that the three of them—Mother, Lionya, and he—were hiding along with Lenin in his horse-tail tent. It was cramped. There wasn’t much room for bravery or anything else. All they could do was huddle together and await an uncertain future. To pass the time, they took turns braiding Mother’s lustrous hair, making sure it framed her delicate temples just so. Even V. I. Lenin had to admit to his young friends that “it is always a great honor to braid the hair of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin of Leningrad.”

BACK IN HIS prava panelak, Vladimir got up from his bed. He tried walking the way Mother had shown him a few months ago in Westchester. He straightened his posture until his back hurt. He put his feet together gentile-style, nearly scuffing his shiny new loafers, a parting gift from SoHo. But in the end he found the whole exercise pointless. If he could survive Soviet kindergarten hobbling Jewishly from humiliation to humiliation, then surely he could survive the scrutiny of some Midwestern clown named Plank.

And yet, even at a distance of half the globe, he could still feel Mother’s fingers poking his spine, her eyes moistening, the lyrical hysteria well on its way… How she had loved him once! How she had doted on her only child! How she had set an absolute standard for herself: I will do anything in the world for him, throw myself in front of the likes of Seryozha Klimov, enlist five-year-old playmates to his cause, leave my dying mother behind to emigrate to the States, force my ne’er-do-well husband into a life of illicit profit, just to make sure little Vladimir continues to breathe each shallow breath in safety and comfort.

How does one person sign over an entire lifetime to another? Selfish Vladimir could hardly begin to imagine it. And yet generations of Jewish-Russian women had done the same for their sons. Vladimir was part of a grand tradition of ultimate sacrifice and unbounded insanity. Only he had somehow managed to break free of this filial bondage and now found himself motherless and alone, punished and chastened.

What do I do now? Vladimir asked the woman across the ocean. Help me, Mama…

Amid the ghostly warble of old Soviet satellites circling over Prava, Mother gave her answer. Proceed, my little treasure! she said. Take those uncultured bastards for all they’re worth!

What? He looked up to the cardboard ceiling above him. He had not expected such criminal candor. But how can you be sure? What about the wrath of Cohen…

Cohen’s an ignoramus, came the reply. He’s no Lionya Abramov. Just another American, like that smiling hippopotamus-girl at my office who tried to screw me over last week. Who’s smiling now, fat suka? … No, the time for Phase Two has come, my son. Take your little poem to the reading. Do not be afraid…

Grateful for the imprimatur, Vladimir lifted his hands up to the sky, as if he could reach out across the ether of uncertain space and false memory and once again braid Mother’s hair on the long train ride to Yalta, massage the white scalp between her parted locks. If I succeed tomorrow, Vladimir told her, it will be because of you. You are the mistress of daring and perseverance. No matter how I may place my feet, I am endowed with everything you have taught me. Please do not worry for me…

My whole life is worry for you, Mother replied, but at this juncture, with a great declarative thump, the living-room door nearly collapsed under the force of two rifle butts.

22. IN THE STEAM ROOM

“VLADIMIR BORISOVICH!” A duo of throaty Russian voices shouted from the hallway, interrupting Vladimir’s transatlantic séance. “Hey, you! Opa! Wake up in there!”

Vladimir quickly waddled over to the door, losing both slippers in his haste, his ears still ringing with Mother’s godlike intonation. “What is the meaning?” he shouted. “I am an associate of the Groundhog!”

“The Groundhog wants you, pussycat,” one of the louts shouted back. “It’s banya time!”

Vladimir opened the door. “What banya?” he said to the two big peasants, their faces completely yellowed by a lifetime of drinking, so that in the pale glow of the hallway they appeared perfectly green. “I have already bathed this morning.”

“The Groundhog said take Vladimir Borisovich to the banya, so put on a towel and let’s go,” they said in unison.

“What nonsense.”

“Do you dispute the Groundhog?”

“I follow the Groundhog’s imperatives blindly,” Vladimir told his intruders, who both looked like adult versions of Seryozha Klimov, the hooligan from kindergarten. What if they tried to pinch him to death à la Seryozha? Mother was certainly not here to protect him, and Lionya Abramov, his former best buddy, was probably running some sleazy night club in Haifa. “Where is this banya?” Vladimir demanded.

“Building three. There is no changing room, so put on your towel now.”

“You expect me to walk over to building three in nothing but a towel.”

“That is the procedure.”

“Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“Yes,” the two men answered without hesitation. “We answer to Gusev!” one of them added, as if that alone explained their impertinence.

AS TOWEL-CLAD VLADIMIR walked across the courtyard to the third panelak flanked by his two armed escorts, a group of Kasino whores peeked out of their gloomy hole to whistle at the near-naked young man, who instinctively covered his breasts with both hands the way he had seen buxom girls do it in pornographic literature. So it had been a setup! Gusev angling to humiliate him, that turd. Perhaps he had forgotten that Vladimir was the son of Yelena Petrovna Girshkin, the ruthless czarina of Scarsdale and Soviet kindergarten both… Well, thought Vladimir, we shall see who will fuck whom, or, as they say in Russian in two simple, elegant syllables—kto kovo.

The banya wasn’t a true Russian bathhouse with its peeling walls and charcoal-stained stoves, but rather a tiny prefab Swedish sauna (as dull and wooden as Vladimir’s furniture), which had been attached to the panelak in a makeshift manner, like a space module to the Mir. Here, the Groundhog and Gusev were slowly cooking themselves alongside a platter of dried fish and a small barrel of Unesko.

“The King of the Americans has deigned to bathe with us,” Gusev announced upon Vladimir’s arrival, fanning himself with a large salt-encrusted perch. Without clothes, Gusev’s body matched the Groundhog’s curve for curve, a preview of what Vladimir would look like ten years hence unless he succumbed to Kostya’s exercise regimen. “And have we been sleeping ’till this late hour?” Gusev asked. “My men tell me your car and driver have been idle all day.”

“And what business is this of yours?” Vladimir said carelessly as he picked up the traditional bundle of birch twigs with which the Russian bather flogs himself, supposedly to improve circulation. He flicked the birch through the air in what was meant to be a menacing gesture, but the wet twigs only said, “Shoo,” in a sad and lethargic way.

“What business?” Gusev bellowed. “According to our money man, in the past two weeks alone you’ve spent five hundred U.S. dollars for drinks, a thousand for dinners, and two thousand for hashish. For hashish, mind you! And this when Marusya has her own little opium garden right here on the premises. Or perhaps our opium’s not good enough for you, eh, Volodechka? Some thrifty Jew we’ve found ourselves, Groundhog. He thinks he’s the party boss of Odessa.”

“Groundhog—” began Vladimir.

“Enough, the two of you!” the Groundhog shouted. “I come to the banya for relaxation, not to hear this pettiness.” He spread himself out on a bench, his stomach overhanging both sides, sweat running down the pocked immensity of his dorsal plane. “Two thousand for hashish, ten thousand for whores… Who cares? Melashvili just phoned from the Sovetskaya Vlast’, they’re leaving Hong Kong with nine hundred thousand worth of crap. Everything’s fine.”

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Gusev sneered, biting off the perch’s head and spitting it onto the steaming logs in the corner. “Melashvili, that nice Georgian black-ass has to toil the world over to keep our Girshkin happy—”

Vladimir leapt up in anger, nearly dropping the towel that covered his small manhood, a weakness he did not want exposed. “Not one more word from you!” he shouted. “In the past two weeks I’ve befriended nearly every American in Prava, I’ve started work on a new literary magazine which will take the Western element by storm, my name has appeared twice in Prava-dence, the expatriate’s journal of record, and tomorrow I will be an honored guest at an important reading of rich English-speakers. And after all the work I’ve done, most of it stupid and degrading, you dare accuse me…”

“Aha! Do you hear that, Goose?” the Groundhog said. “He’s publishing magazines, making rich friends, going to readings. Good boy! Keep at it, and you’ll make me proud. Say, Gusev, remember those readings we used to go to as kids? Those poetry contests… Write a poem on the theme ‘The Oft-Tested Manliness of the Red Tractor Brigade.’ Such fun! I fucked a girl at one of those, I surely did. She was dark like an Armenian. Oh, yes.”

“I do not question your authority,” Gusev began, “but I do—”

“Oh, shut up already, Misha,” the Groundhog said. “Save your whining for the biznesmenski lunch.” He reached over to the fish platter and shoved a small specimen into his mouth. “Vladimir, my friend, come here and strike me with the twigs. Got to keep my blood going, or I’ll melt on the spot.”

“I beg—” Vladimir started to say.

“Hey, hey, fellow!” Gusev shouted as he leapt to his feet. “What’s the meaning? Hey! Only I am permitted to whip the Groundhog. That’s practically diktat around here. Just ask anyone in the organization. Put down those twigs, I say, or it won’t be cheerful for you.”

“You’re being petty again, Mikhail Nikolaevich,” the Groundhog warned. “Why shouldn’t Vladimir give me a whipping? He’s a strong young buck. He’s worked hard. He’s earned it.”

“Just look at him!” shouted Gusev. “He’s flabby and weak-wristed. He’s half my age and already his breasts are distended like a cow’s. Oh, he’ll whip you like a little pederast, that’s for certain! And you deserve so much better, Groundhog.”

Any discomfort Vladimir may have had at the prospect of whipping his employer faded with Gusev’s words. Before he even knew it, his hand had made an angry gesture through the air and there was a clap of thunder at the Groundhog’s back. “Mwwwaaarff!” cried the Groundhog. “Uga. Hey, there. That’s the stuff!”

“Is this the whipping of a pederast?” shouted Vladimir, shockingly unconcerned over the illogic of that sentence, as he flagellated the Hog once again.

“Bozhe moi, that’s pain, all right,” the Groundhog grunted with pleasure. “But a little higher up next time. I’ve got to sit on that thing.”

“To the devil with both of you!” Gusev whispered loudly. He stepped up to Vladimir on his way out, ostensibly to give him the look of a lifetime, but Vladimir, knowing better, busied his eyes with the red topography of the Groundhog’s back, a challenge for any budding cartographer. Still, he couldn’t avoid a glimpse of Gusev’s neck, a thick and corded piece of anatomy, despite the corpulent disorder below.

Only after Gusev had slammed the door behind him did Vladimir remember his childhood fear of saunas, the paranoid feeling that someone was going to lock the door and let him steam to death inside. He thought of himself and the Groundhog trapped together, their skin as translucent as that of a steamed dumpling, nothing inside but boiled meat: it seemed like the worst death imaginable.

“Oh, but why have you stopped,” moaned the Groundhog.

“No, I shall prevail over that fat-necked bastard,” Vladimir muttered to himself, and he set to task with such ferocity that upon his first strike a purple-black pimple exploded, and the Hog’s heavy blood made its way through the sauna’s fishy air, which was as thick and inviolable as Gusev himself.

“Yes, yes,” the Groundhog shouted. “That’s the way! How quickly you learn, Vladimir Borisovich.”