The Russian Debutante's Handbook

23. THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF BEING

THE JOY WAS a vegetarian restaurant but beneath it lay a meat market of a disco where the perennially hard-up regulars lured unsuspecting backpackers, many still sporting their Phi Zeta Mu T-shirts, into nights of forgetfulness and mornings of waking up on a futon in the nether reaches of Prava’s suburbs, trying to connect with an authority figure back in the States on an antiquated telephone that could barely reach out across the Tavlata. On Sundays they had readings.

Vladimir went down the threadbare stairs, where the small pink-and-mauve dance floor was lit up by a series of overly bright halogen lights, giving the place the look of a rather impersonal womb. Presently, this arena accommodated three rings of plastic chairs and weathered couches and recliners; randomly placed coffee tables were home to bright, shapely drinks from the bar; and the artists and spectators themselves wore their Sunday best—jackets all around and hair tied or slicked back. Earrings and piercings gleamed peacefully from within their thoroughly scrubbed fleshy enclosures, gusts of rolled American Spirit tobacco emerged from fresh-colored lips, lingered in newly trimmed goatees.

The young men and women cast to populate this postmodern Belle Epoque turned to face the new entrant and kept their gazes fixed as he walked into the inner circle of seating where a space was reserved for him between Cohen and Maxine, the mythologizer of Southern interstates.

Vladimir walked in with his legs atremble. He had made a terrible mistake immediately upon his arrival by instructing Jan to deposit him at the front door to the Joy, where the entering hordes were treated to the spectacle of an artist alighting from a chauffeured BMW. True, he was supposed to be a wealthy artist, but this arrogant spectacle was undoubtedly a mistake, the kind of faux pas that within minutes would be circulated to Budapest and back by Marcus and his Marxish fiends.

To Vladimir’s further chagrin, it appeared that the few readers in the group were distinguished by a spiral notebook much like his own, a fact not lost on Cohen who stared at Vladimir’s tome, mouth agape, then turned to its owner, his eyelids at half-mast with contempt.

It was, thus far, a silent gathering. Plank was asleep on an enormous imported La-Z-Boy recliner, dreaming of last night’s bacchanal. Cohen was too angry to make a peep. Even Alexandra was uncharacteristically silent. She was too busy looking over Vladimir and Maxine, probably trying them on as a couple; the blond and sprightly Maxine had just been picked out as Vladimir’s mate by the Crowd’s informal council on dating. But, of course, it was long, trim Alexandra that Vladimir wanted. Her beauty, her unreserved enthusiasm contributed heavily to his infatuation, and yet there was more: He had found out recently that she was born of a lower-class family! Semiliterate Portuguese dock workers from a place called Elizabeth, New Jersey. The idea that she had come to Prava from this noisy, poorly lit, deeply Catholic household with its abusive men and pregnant women (what else could it have been like?) restored much of Vladimir’s lapsed faith in the world. Yes, it could be done. People could change their life chances with a few elegant strokes yet remain beautiful and at ease and kind and solicitous, too. Alexandra’s world, despite its artistic pretensions, was a world of possibilities; there was so much she could teach him, she with a stocking ripped exactly at the point where one world-class thigh began to curve into shape.

Meanwhile, the silence continued, save for the last-minute scribbling of some of the artists. Vladimir was frightened. Were they still thinking about his BMW? Any minute now, it seemed, a Stalinist denunciation was to begin, with him the purgee.

Artist 1, a tall dirty-haired boy in Coke-bottle glasses: “Citizen V. Girshkin is charged with antisocial activity, the promulgation of an odious persona and nonexistent literary magazine, and possession of an Automobile of the Enemy as defined in the USSR Criminal Codex 112/43.2.”

Girshkin: “But I’m a businessman…”

Artist 2, a big-eared redhead with cracked lips: “Enough said. Ten years hard labor in the People’s Limestone Extraction Facility in Phzichtcht, Slovakia. Don’t start with the ‘Russian Jew’ crap, Girshkin!”

Instead, a sinewy, older gentleman emerged from the shadows. He had no hair save for two sets of overgrown curls rising above his head like devil’s horns, and sagging corduroys that could have accommodated a matching tail. “Hi, I’m Harold Green,” he said.

“Hi, Harry!” This was Alexandra, of course.

“Hi, Alex. Hi, Perry. Wake up, Plank.” Harry Green’s eyes—kind and avuncular, but also with the requisite expatriate glaze that plagued every English speaker in Prava—settled on Vladimir, where they blinked slowly and repeatedly like a skyscraper’s warning lights.

“He owns this place,” Maxine whispered in Vladimir’s ear. “He’s the son of very rich Canadians.”

Harold instantaneously ceased to be a mystery, one less variable in Vladimir’s co-optation formula. He imagined patting the dear fellow’s naked crown, suggesting minoxidil, a new interior decorator for his club, a new worldview for his cocktail hour, a sizable investment in Groundhog, Inc… .

“So, we’ve got here a list.” Harold picked up a clipboard. “Anyone not penned their John Hancock, or Jan Hancock for those of you of the Stolovan persuasion?”

Vladimir saw his hand rise, a small, pale creature.

“VLADIMIR,” Harold read off the clipboard. “A Stolovan name, no? Bulgarian, no? Romanian, no? No? So who do we have to start? Lawrence Litvak. Paging Mr. Litvak. Please step right up, Larry.”

Mr. Litvak tucked in his Warhol T-shirt; checked his zipper momentarily; brushed back a tendril of blond, dreadlocked hair, and took to the magic spot from which Harold had spoken. Vladimir recognized him from the Nouveau and likeminded places, where he always had as his sidekick an enormous blue bong, and where he was happiest when regaling passers-by with war stories culled from his brief, standard-issue life.

“This is a story,” Larry said, “called ‘Yuri Gagarin.’ Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet astronaut who was the first man in space. Later he died in a plane crash.” He cleared his throat, a little too thoroughly, and gulped back the fruits of his besieged lung.

Poor, dead Yuri Gagarin was conscripted into a tale about Larry’s Stolovan girlfriend, a veritable Rapunzel whose untrimmed hair and penchant for Tony Bennett played at fantastic decibels made her an outcast in her own panelak. That is, until Prince Larry came along, fresh from his proving grounds at the University of Maryland, College Park: “‘Prava will be good for you,’ my writing professor POSITED. ‘Just don’t fall in love,’ he said EVINCING what would happen if I did to the contrary, as had happened to him in 1945, a young G.I.,” etc.

The narrator installs our heroine Tavlatka—a water nymph as her name suggests, and as the long and graphic scene in the communal swimming pool amply illustrated—in his apartment conveniently located in the Old Town. (How did Larry get the money to live in the Old Town? Vladimir made a mental note for PravaInvest purposes.) They smoke a lot of hash and have sex, “in the manner of the Stolovans.” Meaning what? Under a blanket of ham?

Ultimately, the relationship hits a snag. At some point in the middle of the sex a conversation on the space race is launched and Tavlatka, soiled by a decade of agit-prop, insists that Yuri Gagarin was the first man on the moon. Our narrator, a leftist softy, to be sure, is still an American. And an American knows his rights: “‘It was Neil Armstrong,’ I hissed into the small of her back. ‘And he was no cosmonaut.’ My Tavlatka spun around, her nipples no longer erect, a tear welling in both eyes. ‘Get you out of here,’ she said, in that funny yet tragic way of hers.”

After that things really fall apart. Tavlatka boots our hero out of his own apartment and he, with no place to go, starts sleeping on a little tatami mat by the New Town Kmart, selling nudes of himself to old German ladies on the Emanuel Bridge (go, Larry!), making just enough money for the occasional knockwurst and a Kmart pullover. There’s no mention of what Tavlatka does, but one remains hopeful that she makes good use of Larry’s Old Town pad.

Here, Vladimir lost the narrative thread for a while, his eyes doing a Baedeker’s tour of Alexandra’s ankle, but he did manage to catch the scene where Tavlatka and the narrator seek the truth in an old Stolovan library smelling “sourly of books,” and then the grand finale in bed where both Tavlatka and Larry emerge with their bodies “drenched, satiated… understanding that which the mind cannot.”

FIN and BRAVO! BRAVO! The circle congregated around Litvak to pay their dues. Cohen had a turn at the wunderkind with a full frontal hug and hair ruffle, but Larry had bigger fish to fry: He was looking for pan-seared Girshkin on a bed of shallots in red wine sauce. “Remember me?” he croaked to Vladimir from within Cohen’s anaconda grip. He half-closed his eyes, managed to loosen the top button of his shirt, and rolled his head about to demonstrate his usual late-night demeanor.

“Right,” said Vladimir, “Air Raid Shelter, Reprè, Martini Bar…”

“You never told me you were starting a literary mag,” Larry said, maneuvering out of Cohen’s arms, nearly throwing the jilted Iowan off balance.

“Well, you never told me you were a writer,” Vladimir said. “I’m a little hurt, actually. Your talent is shocking.”

“How strange,” Larry said. “That’s the first thing I usually mention.”

“No matter,” Vladimir said. “That story definitely belongs in…” They never had settled on a name for the magazine. Something Latin, French, Mediterranean—yes, Mediterranean cuisine was gaining in global popularity, surely its literature would follow. Now what was the name of that famous Sicilian alchemist and charlatan? “Cagliostro.”

“Dig the name.”

Indeed. “Only I can’t really make that kind of editorial decision,” Vladimir said. “You need to talk to my editor-in-chief Perry Cohen over there. Me, I’m just the publisher.” But before Vladimir could redeem his plummeting stock with Editor & Friend Cohen, Harry Green was lowing for them all to sit and pipe down in his purposeful Canadian Prairie way. “Vladimir Girshkin,” he called out. “Who is Vladimir Girshkin?”

Who indeed?

Vladimir Girshkin was a man who once instinctively moved in the wrong direction and invariably got knocked down every time he saw a person running his way. Vladimir Girshkin once said “thank you” and “sorry” when there was absolutely no need, and often employed a bow so deep it would have been excessive at Emperor Hirohito’s court. Once upon a time Vladimir Girshkin held Challah in his reed-thin arms and prayed that she would never be hurt again, and, to that end, vowed to be her protector and benefactor.

But presently he held a single sheet of paper in front of him, his right arm unfolding predictably like an architect’s swivel lamp… Steady as she goes…

He read:

There it was. A poem with little to impart but with clean lines like the room at a good bed-and-breakfast: simple wooden furniture, a tasteful framed print hanging above the couch of some sylvan scene—moose-in-brook, cabin-lost-in-trees, whatever. In other words, thought Vladimir, it was absolutely nothing. The kind of garbage that finds its own void and soundlessly disappears into same.

Pandemonium! Standing ovation! A regular riot! The Bolsheviks were storming the Winter Palace, the Viet Cong were massing around the American embassy, Elvis had entered the building. Apparently nobody in the Joy crowd had yet thought of writing a small poem that wasn’t entirely self-conscious or self-referential. NATO planes had not yet been called in to carpet-bomb the city with William Carlos Williams’s collected work. It was quite a coup for Vladimir.

Amid the blare of applause and the trumpet of Maxine delivering her lip-to-lip kiss for the public record, Vladimir made a note of another promising phenomenon: a woman of deeply American appearance (although she was not blond), a clear-skinned, full-faced, brown-haired young woman dressed in mail-order outdoorsy pants and linen blouse, who probably smelled like an environmentally correct shampoo of apples and citrus with an undercurrent of rain-forest soap, was clapping away, her ruddy face made all the more so with simple, unabashed adulation for Vladimir Girshkin. Our man in Prava.

UPSTAIRS, AT THE vegetarian portion of the Joy, a round metal table of Stolovan unsturdiness was rolled out for the conquering heroes; it tipped back and forth beneath portions of black hummus the consistency of loam and the tureens of beet-red minestrone top-heavy with actual beets. Vladimir got placed in a little male semicircle of Cohen (who refused to look at Vladimir), Larry Litvak (who wouldn’t bother looking at anyone else), and Plank (unconscious). Vladimir glanced about nervously, feeling a heterosexual opportunity being squandered. To wit, the clean and comely American woman he had branded with his verse had also made the trek upstairs. She was sitting at the “Carrot Bar” with the rest of the peons, chatting up a tourist boy. At measured intervals she looked over to Vladimir’s table and smiled with her ointment-shiny lips and milk-white teeth, as if to quash the rumor that she wasn’t enjoying herself.

King Vladimir waved her over—it was something new he was learning to do with his hand. And he was getting good at it, for instantly she picked her purse off the bar and left the tourist boy with his beer and his crew cut and his stories of what the governor did at his sister’s wedding.

“Scoot over,” Vladimir said to the boys and the seats were shuffled, water spilled, complaints voiced.

She was awkward, navigating to her seat (“sorry, sorry, sorry”) and Vladimir didn’t help matters by moving closer to sniff at her linen blouse. Yes, rain-forest soap. Correct. But what to make of the rest of her? She had what in the Girshkin family would be considered the beginnings of a nose, an outcropping really, a small belvedere overlooking the long, thin lips, circular chin, and beneath that the full breasts that bespoke a successful American adolescence. Vladimir had but one thought: Why was her hair past shoulder-length, given the present-day urban conventions that demanded shortness, brevity? Was she, perhaps, a stranger to hipness? Questions, questions.

But like most pretty people she made a positive impression on the Crowd. “Hi,” Alexandra said to her, and by the sparkling expression on her face it might as well have been a cry of “Landsman!”

“Hi,” the newcomer said.

“I’m Alexandra.”

“I’m Morgan.”

“Nice to meet you, Alexandra.”

“Nice to meet you, Morgan.”

And then the niceness ended and was replaced by a universal uproar over the talentless Harry the Canadian and how everything would be so much better, so much more dignified, if they (the Crowd) owned the Joy and its literary legacy. Here all eyes turned to Vladimir. Vladimir sighed. The Joy? Wasn’t the goddamn literary magazine enough for them? What next, a Gertrude Stein theme park? “Listen,” Vladimir said, “we’ve got to get the ball rolling on Cagliostro.”

“Ca—what?” Cohen said.

“The magazine,” Larry Litvak said with a roll of the eyes. When not stoned out of his gourd he apparently found ignorance quite shocking.

“We’re calling it what?” Cohen said, turning on Vladimir.

“Remember you were reading that obscure Milanese metahistorical journal about that Sicilian charlatan and alchemist, Cagliostro, and you said, ‘Hey, aren’t we all just a little like him, staking out our claim in this postsocialist wilderness?’ Remember?”

“Cag-li-ostro!” Alexandra said with flair. “Oh, I like that.”

There were murmurs of approbation.

“Right,” Cohen said. “Actually I was thinking of a couple of names, like maybe Beef Stew, but… You’re right. Whatever. Let’s just run with my first thought.”

“So this is not going to be a mainstream journal,” Morgan said. She looked very sober there, with her hands in her lap, her eyes open wide, her well-plucked eyebrows raised as she tried to put in her two cents among the loud and fractious Crowd. It was bewildering for Vladimir to see a beautiful person who didn’t make herself the center of attention in one way or another (Alexandra always pulled it off so well!), and he didn’t make things any easier by saying: “Mainstream? We’re not even treading the same brook as the others.”

But before she could be embarrassed, the conversation instantly shifted toward the topic of the lead piece, and L. Litvak brazenly put forth his Yuri Gagarin space odyssey, when Cohen turned to him and said, “But how can we even consider passing up Vladimir’s poem for the top spot?”

Everyone hushed. Vladimir searched Cohen’s face for sarcasm, but it looked tempered, not so much resigned as perspicacious, understanding. With the empty beer bottles in front of him and a smudge of hummus in the fluff of his pseudobeard, Vladimir took a mental snapshot of Cohen as he had pretended to have taken a picture of Mother in the nonexistent Chinese restaurant. Friend Cohen getting wisdom, catching on.

“Yes, of course, Vladimir’s poem,” said the awakened Plank.

“Of course,” Maxine said. “It’s the most redeeming piece I’ve heard since I’ve come here.”

“By all means, Vladimir’s poem!” shouted Alexandra. “And Marcus can decorate it. You can draw something, honey.”

“Then you can put my story right after it,” Larry said. “It’ll act as counterbalance.”

Vladimir picked up a glass of absinthe. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “I would like to take the credit for this work myself, but, sadly, I can’t. Without Perry’s mentorship, I could have never cut to the heart of the matter. I’d still be writing the adolescent crap, the shaggy-dog poems. So, please, a toast!”

“To me!” Cohen smiled his “Sunrise, Sunset” elderly papa smile. He reached over to pat Vladimir’s head.

“You know…” Morgan was saying after the ripples of the toast had subsided and no one had anything else to say. “You people. This reading. This is all so new to me. Where I come from… Nobody… This is sort of how I pictured Prava. This is kind of why I came here.”

Vladimir’s jaw dropped at the sound of this unsolicited honesty. What the hell was she doing? You don’t just admit these things, no matter how true they are. Did Young Beauty (with the long brown hair) need an introductory course in poseurdom? Self-invention 101?

But the Crowd soaked it right in, punching each other’s shoulders in jest. Yes, they sort of kind of knew what she was talking about, this sweet, dazzling newcomer in their midst.

They took Morgan with them after they left the Joy. Later, when Alexandra got the chance to be alone and personal with her in a decaying Lesser Quarter ladies’ room, she found out that Morgan had found Vladimir’s poetry “brilliant” and Vladimir himself “exotic.” So maybe there was hope for her, after all.

BUT VLADIMIR PUT her out of his mind. There was serious work to do. Phase Two had gone off without a hitch; bad poetry had carried the day; the checkbooks were out and ready. He looked to Harold Green, generously making his way past the supplicants at the Carrot Bar, each begging for one of the Joy’s hefty artist-in-residence grants. By the looks of him, Harold was on the most important mission of his life. Destination: Girshkin.

No doubt about it, Phase Three’s time had come.

The suckling phase.

24. COLE PORTER AND GOD

WAKE UP, SHOWER, and get to church. Vladimir did as his pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience told him. He swallowed vitamins and drank glasses of water. His new alarm clock was still howling. He put on his one and only suit bought on a whim from the new German department store for tens of thousands of crowns and realized that it was meant for a person twice his size. “Dobry fucking den’,” he said to himself in the mirror.

In the side lot by the opium garden, his car was idling along with Jan. The sky was a desolate bleached-out blue with patches of russet clouds as thick as bark on which, it seemed, advertisements could be placed and sailed above the city. Kostya was doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps; the gardening lessons imparted by Vladimir’s father had long lost their relevance.

“Good morning, Tsarevitch Vladimir,” Kostya said upon seeing him. He looked more dignified than ever today—no nylon, just khakis, brogues, and white cotton shirt.

“Tsarevitch?” Vladimir said.

Kostya ambled over and snapped the shearlike things at Vladimir, missing him by centimeters. He seemed all too happy at the prospect of a Russian Orthodox Sunday. “The check cleared from the Canadian!” he shouted. “What’s his name? Harold Green. The club owner.”

“The full quarter million? You mean… Heavenly God… Are you saying that…?” Was he saying that U.S.$250,000.00, the equivalent of fifty years of wages for the average Stolovan, had gushed into the Groundhog’s kitty like the Neva River melting in the spring? And all through Vladimir’s free-market treachery? No, it could not be. The world rested on sounder poles: north and south; the Dow Jones and the Nikkei; the wages of sin and the minimum wage. But to sell two hundred and sixty shares of PravaInvest at U.S.$960.00 a pop… That was out there in Loop-de-Loop Land where Jim Jones, Timothy Leary, and Friedrich Engels rode their unicorns up and away into the pink-purple sky.

True, Vladimir did recall Harry drunk and delusional at the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, his head in his hands, his pate, bald and moist, gleaming like the martini decanters arrayed above the bar. Slobbering, weeping: “I have no talent, my young Russian friend. Only off-shore accounts.”

“Get out of here!” Vladimir barked without warning, surprising even himself. This was the tone of Mother addressing one of her native-born underlings, some poor accountant with a state school education. Was Vladimir drunk? Or was he more sober than ever? It felt like a little bit of both.

“What?” Harry said.

“Get out of this country! Nobody wants you here.”

Harry pressed his drink to his chest and shook his head without comprehending.

“Look at you,” Vladimir continued bellowing. “You’re a little white boy in a big white man’s body. Your father and his capitalist cronies destroyed my nation. Yes, they fucked the peace-loving Soviet people right and proper.”

“But, Vladimir!” Harry cried. “What are you saying? What nation? It was the Soviets who invaded the Stolovan Republic in 1969—”

“Don’t start with your cozy little facts. We do not bow to your facts.” Vladimir suspended his diatribe for a minute and took a deep breath. We do not bow to facts? Hadn’t he seen that slogan once, in his youth, on a communist propaganda poster in Leningrad? Just what the hell was he becoming? Vladimir the Heartless Apparatchik?

“But you’re wealthy yourself,” Harry protested through his tears. “You have a chauffeur, a BMW, that nice felt hat.”

“But that is my right!” Vladimir bellowed, ignoring the kindly impulses his better organ—his heart—was pumping through the left ventricle along with the liters of frothy type-O blood. There would be time to indulge Mr. Heart later… This was war! “Have you not heard of identity politics?” Vladimir shouted. “Are you daft, man? To be rich in my own milieu, to partake in the economic rebirth of my own part of the world, why, if that’s not part of my narrative, what the hell is?” At this point, Vladimir himself almost became misty-eyed as he pictured Francesca, the woman at whose feet he had learned the ways of the world, walking in through the gilded doors of the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, smiling wanly as Vladimir beheaded this sorry creature in the same way she used to castrate the politically challenged masses in New York. Oh, Frannie. This is for you, honey! Let greatness and beauty prevail over baldness and nullity…

“My narrative!” Vladimir resumed screaming. “It’s about me, not about you, you imperialist American swine.”

“I’m Canadian,” Harry whispered.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Vladimir shouted, grabbing him by the folds of his oversized rugby sweater. “Don’t even go there, pal.”

AND LATER, IN the rank Nouveau bathroom, where the piss of the English-speaking world mingled on the chipped marble, Vladimir personally applied minoxidil around the Arctic outposts of Harry’s remaining hair, while a lone, smashed New Zealand tourist looked on, one hand poised to reach for the door in case things went too far.

By this point, Vladimir was rocked from side to side by waves of pity. Oh, that poor Harry Green! Oh, why was embezzlement so cruel? Why couldn’t rich people just spontaneously give money away like that nice Soros fellow? Vladimir even leaned over to kiss Harry’s wet brow like a concerned parent. “There, there,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?” Harry said, wiping his scarlet eyes, blowing his tiny twisted nose, trying to regain the quiet dignity that, before this wretched evening, had been his signature. “Even if I do grow back my hair, that’s only half the battle. I’ll still be old. I’ll still be a… What did you call me?”

“An interloper.”

“Oh, God.”

“Harry, my sweet man,” Vladimir said, recapping the minoxidil bottle, his portable fountain of youth. “What am I going to do with you, huh?”

“What? What?” Vladimir looked at Harry’s reflection in the mirror. Those huge red eyes, the freckled chin, the receding gums. It was almost too much. “What are you going to do with me, Vladimir?”

AND TWENTY MINUTES later, winding through the darkened streets around the walls of the castle, the parapets coming in and out of the corners of vision, Beethoven’s Seventh blaring off the CD player, Vladimir held the checkbook steady on the crying Canadian’s lap. To be honest, Vladimir was shaking a little, too. It was hard to come to terms with what he had done. But this wasn’t really the worst kind of crime, now was it? They were going to print a literary journal! A journal with Harry’s name prominently displayed. It was all part of the familiar cultural Ponzi scheme practiced the world over—from third-rate dance collectives to those idiotic creative-writing programs. The participants put in their time and money, dutifully attended each other’s kazoo recitals and poetry readings, and by the end of the day the only ingredient missing from their enterprise was the actual talent (much as a regular Ponzi scheme lacks the actual cash). Still, was it so terribly wrong to give people a little hope…?

“PravaInvest will do for you what cultural relativism did for me,” Vladimir said, patting the soft head resting warmly on his shoulder. “Now, two hundred sixty shares is not a lot. I’ve got a couple of Swiss going in for three thousand. But it’s an introduction to the global continuum. It’s a start.”

“Ooh, if only my father knew where his lousy money was going!” Harry laughed. “I can’t wait to fax him that Cagliostro journal. And pictures of that hospital in Sarajevo! And the Reiki clinic, too!”

“Now, now,” Vladimir said, as the car’s headlights illuminated an archway carved into a castle wall, beyond which the Lower City was repositioning itself so that its spires would lie directly at Vladimir’s feet. “Let’s not be spiteful, Harry.” And he gave his new investor a pleasant squeeze, then ordered Jan to set a course for Harry’s villa, where his gurgling friend, reeking of minoxidil and self-love, could be deposited for the night.

And that was that. The cash register opened, the digits turned, the sun rose once again over Prava.

“YES, THE FULL quarter-million,” Kostya said, confirming yesterday’s wondrous news, as he fell on his knees before the young tsar and kissed his hand with his dry, chapped lips.

“And ten percent of it is mine,” Vladimir said. He had not intended to say it out loud, but to stifle a sentiment like that was not possible.

“The Groundhog said he will give you twenty percent as an incentive,” Kostya said. “Can you lunch with him after church?”

“Of course!” Vladimir said. “Let’s hurry then! Jan, start the car!”

“No expensive car, please,” Kostya said.

“Pardon?”

“We show our piety on the way to church by taking public transportation like the rest of the congregants.”

“Oh my God! Are you serious?” This was a little much. “Couldn’t we just take a Fiat or something?”

Jan smiled and twirled the car keys around his meaty forefinger. “I’ll drive you gentlemen as far as the metro station,” he said. “Now be good Christians and kindly open your own doors.”

THE METRO WAS designed in the Lenin’s Starship motif: the walls chrome-plated in futuristic shades of that socialist-friendly color, ecru; the cameras at the edge of the platform recording the reactionary tendencies of the passengers; the Soviet-built trains that inspired many an Ode to Moving Metal from besotted Slavs around the bloc; the recorded voice of some sturdy, no-nonsense Heroine of Socialist Labor over the public address system: “Desist in entering and exiting! The doors are about to close.”

And close they did, as fast as lightning cranked out of some totalitarian power-station out in the woods. Look! Everywhere Vladimir turned—Stolovans, Stolovans, Stolovans! Stolovans in Prava, of all places! Dobry den’, Milan! Howdy do, Teresa? Did you get a haircut, Bouhumil? Panko, stop climbing on the seats!

The wagonful of these “Stolovans on the Move” rumbled toward the Tavlata. At the Castle station they picked up some British grade-schoolers in uniform who swiftly moved to one corner and behaved themselves like good little gentlemen. They were disgorged at the Old Town station, the last outpost of Tourist Prava, and were replaced by teenage locals with out-of-control acne, polyester leisure suits, and high-tops.

On and on they went. The distances between the stations got progressively longer. The bored teenage boys were now making slurping sounds to one of their girlfriends, a tall pimpled beauty in a Lycra skirt who took out a book and busied herself flipping through the pages, while a babushka waved a fist the size of a beefsteak tomato at the boys and shouted something about their “unsocialist upbringing.”

“Hooligans!” Kostya said. “And on a Sunday, too.” Vladimir nodded and pretended to doze off. At his present rate of ascension he could foresee a time when it would be possible to tell Kostya the Angel to bugger off, and to let his debauchery and projected lechery assume the sum total of his waking hours. But he had to have a friend in the Russian circuit, a shield from Gusev and the merry men with the Kalashnikovs out in the lobby. Everyone held Kostya in high regard, this Vladimir knew. When Kostya went to church, it was as if he went to church for all of them. Plus he knew something about computers—you could never underestimate that.

And then, while Vladimir never enjoyed the huffing and puffing sessions beneath the sun, and the craziness with the ten-pound dumbbells, he was aware of a new physical vitality that went along nicely with his new big-man-on-campus image. For instance, he was straighter, and, as a consequence, taller. His breasts, the objects of Gusev’s merriment, which had at one point reached such a state of disrepair that even Vladimir himself had started to find them mildly arousing, were slowly being shaped into two hard little mounds suitable for flexing. His lungs were in better order, too—he didn’t leave a trail of mucus behind after each lap; when smoking hashish he could keep the smoke in longer and let it percolate among the nooks and crannies of his asthma-scarred villus.

But still he wanted freedom from the Lord’s man in Prava, or at least a lighter schedule. More time to splash water on his face and get his bearings in the morning.

BY THE TIME they disembarked they were the only ones left on the train. At ground level the main smokestack of a factory rose dramatically above them like a NASA rocket with a serious fire in the capsule. In one direction a distant huddle of panelaks shimmered in the translucent chemical haze. In another direction there appeared to be a vast stretch of nothing. Kostya looked toward the nothing, using his hand as a visor against the late morning sun. Vladimir looked to the cherub and smiled, trying to appear both enthusiastic and confused. He made a few epic sweeps of the hand as if to indicate that the “nothing” was not a good thing and the powder towers and jazz clubs of the Golden City were really more his cup of grog.

Kostya remained unmoved. He found a bus schedule tacked on to an enormous electrified fence that enclosed the factory. “There,” he said. “There should be one now.”

And by the dictate of God, Kostya’s coconspirator, an entirely empty double-jointed bus, its two tremendous halves bound together by a thick oval of rubber, rounded the corner, raising dust in its wake. The bus stopped, let out a long sigh as if overcome by its loneliness for passengers, and opened its many doors.

THEY RUMBLED THROUGH the fields of emptiness, the giant factory growing distant in the dirty rectangle of the back window. The empty fields looked to Vladimir as if they had been tortured by Romania’s dreaded Securitate, the soil randomly upturned and heaped into mounds or depleted into mini-canyons.

Kostya sat pensively, his hands cupped together as if he was praying already, which might have been the case. “You know, my mother’s very sick,” he said without the customary preamble.

“How terrible,” Vladimir quickly replied.

“Yes. I don’t know how it will turn out. I’m going to pray for her.”

“Of course.” Vladimir fidgeted quietly. “I’ll pray for her too.”

Kostya gave his thanks and turned to the window and the empty view. “If you want,” Vladimir said, “I can give you the money to fly her to Austria for better medical treatment. That is, if you need the money.”

“I thought about that. Of doing it with my own money. But I want her in Russia in case she… I want her to be surrounded by her own people.” Vladimir nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment, but somehow the phrase “her own people” reminded him of the fact that these concerned and helpful (and mythical) Russians of the medical profession were a far cry from his own people, whom Kostya’s mother would probably not appreciate milling about her deathbed with their legendary big noses and dirty hands. But then again, that was just an assumption. There were some Russians who weren’t like that. Kostya, for one, knew of Vladimir’s missing foreskin and never said anything derogatory. On the other hand, he was taking him to church.

Amid the empty fields they came across “The International Technological Joint Venture—FutureTek 2000,” announced by a freshly painted billboard on the side of the road. It resembled something of a Victorian-era factory mated to a grain silo, really just a collection of thick, rusted pipes and bulbous metal containers joined together at odd angles. To think that somewhere within this pastiche of industrial decay a new fax modem was waiting to be born was to invest too much hope in the resilience of the human spirit.

Now, thought Vladimir, you take some white plaster walls, throw them up around the factory, perforate a mock-tinted window along one of the sides, stick a couple of recycling bins out front, and presto! Why sell worthless shares to Stolovans at ten crowns a pop, when you can unload them to Americans at ten dollars? He made a note.

THE CHURCH WAS hiding behind the factory, with a small field of failing carrots separating the two. It looked rather Appalachian, the church did—a little corrugated tin shack with a metal Orthodox cross that gleamed amid the empty surroundings like a television antenna bringing news of civilization beyond. “Please,” said Kostya and opened the door for him.

You couldn’t mistake the parishioners for anything but Russians. Tired, stern faces that even in the meditative act of prayer looked ready to kick some ass for their fair share of beets, sugar, and a parking space for the beat-up Lada microsedan. Broad, heavy bodies bursting with thick veins and copious sweat, looking as if they had been somehow blown out of proportion by a diet of meat and butter—par for the course in a world where one had to appear as formidable as a tank to start the wheels of distribution turning.

Kostya bowed to a few of them and pointed at Vladimir, eliciting several difficult smiles and the tiniest of whispers. Vladimir hoped he looked more like Jesus than Trotsky to them, but an icon above the altar showed the prototype of the one whose second coming was awaited—a very gentile Christ indeed, with light brown hair verging on dirty blond, the traditional soft-focus physiognomy, and, of course, a look of supreme transcendence that Vladimir didn’t even want to begin to fathom. Yup, he was in church.

But it wasn’t too shabby, the service. There was a certain uncertainty to the message, the way the priest, as bearded and robed and wizened as could be (you knew you were getting your piety’s worth with this guy), would belt out, singsong-like: “Je-sus has risen!” and the crowd would reply in unison, “Verily, He has risen.” Nice the way this central fact had to be constantly affirmed. But of course, He has risen. What would it all mean if He hadn’t risen, eh, Vanya?

And crossing yourself was great too, kneeling and crossing endlessly. It felt good—swift and powerful. The goys were good with the swift-and-powerful shtick. Columbus and his wooden armada sweeping into the New World on an Atlantic breeze and a prayer; the medieval English galloping through hot, dusty Palestine bedecked in a ton of steel. Crossing, always crossing themselves. Before the Hebrew God you could only bow repeatedly and feel sorry about your place beneath Him, but with Christ there it was, with your hand—up, then down, then right, then left. Christ has risen? Why, yes, verily.

Vladimir must have crossed himself impressively because several of the babushkas, their blue eyes glowing within their shawls, were clearly taking note of his vigorous motions and loud proclamations. Kostya gave him a smile so wide it could have been redeemed for a place in Heaven. This went on for a while, the tiny room suffused with the brightness of candles and a pair of oversized, out-of-place halogen torchieres like the floor samples Vladimir had seen at the German department store. The smell of sweat and the incense swung about by the priest was getting a bit heady and just as Vladimir was making sure the back door was still present and accessible, Christ was resurrected one last time and it was all over.

They lined up before the priest who kissed them in turn and said something brief to each congregant. Waiting on line, Kostya introduced Vladimir to a couple of nice old ladies whose doubts about “the dark one” had dissipated over the course of the services like the whoosh of stale air released over the empty horizon upon the opening of the front door. The priest kissed Vladimir on the left cheek and the right, his breath smelling surprisingly of dill pickles, and said, “Welcome, my dear young one. Christ has risen.”

“Yes, um,” said Vladimir, although there was, of course, a better way of saying it; they had, in fact, just said it three hundred times. But His Holiness, broad-shouldered and erect despite his considerable age, with his booming voice and pungent kisses, would make even the most godless members of the Spartacist League quiver in their ankle-high Doc Martens. “You must be Greek,” the priest said.

“Half-Greek, half-Russian,” Vladimir said. It just came out that way.

“Delightful. Will you join us for a little meal now?”

“Sadly, I can’t. I’m expected with my family in Thessalonica. I was just off to the airport. But next week, definitely.”

“Delightful,” the priest said again, and then he had his turn with Kostya, who whispered something into his ear which made the priest laugh uproariously, his beard, as grand and white as his person, taking on a hairy life of its own. It was a mirth Vladimir could not understand, since God’s business was, by all means, a serious one, especially when one of your flock proved to be a Jew in Greek’s clothing.

He bowed his way past the congregants and out the door, where a steady autumn rain was gathering force and the sky appeared a tablecloth of unrelenting gray.

WELL, THAT WAS all over with, thank God, and off he was in his marvel of Bavarian tinkering, speeding away on the Tavlata’s eastern embankment, thinking Faster! Faster, Jan! for the Groundhog and the most expensive restaurant in Prava awaited. Oh, he had been duplicitous with the Angel, as always, getting off at a suburban metro station to “briefly visit an American friend, a pious man of Serbian lineage…” And there, by prior arrangement, Jan and the unholy Beamer awaited their master. Taking the metro to lunch—a little too déclassé for an upscale gonif like Vladimir.

The restaurant was situated opposite the castle, with full view of the river growing full under the autumn rain, tourists galloping across the Emanuel Bridge, their umbrellas torn apart by a wind strong enough to have breathed life into a hundred Golems. It was a restaurant popular with rich Germans and American mommies and daddies visiting their drifting progeny, and, yes, a certain Russian “entrepreneur.”

The Groundhog kissed Vladimir on both cheeks and then presented his own pock-marked ones. Vladimir closed his eyes and uttered a ridiculous “Mwa!” with each kiss.

With the male Eastern European love overture complete, Vladimir was allowed to take his seat; across the table, the Groundhog squirmed like a happy little papoose in its swaddling clothes, only he was a large, corpulent mafioso in an unflatteringly tight brown suit. “Look,” he said, “your appetizer’s already here!”

True enough, there was a circle of fatty rings of squid lying atop, of all things, butternut squash, with some sort of powder dusted in the middle that smelled vaguely of parmesan and garlic. At twenty dollars a plate, the restaurant promised to serve no carp, its wine list was purged of the sickly-sweet Moravian vintages that made Prava’s head spin, and the proprietors had airlifted an actual old guy from Paris to tickle their Steinway’s ivories beneath a huge Art Nouveau spread of frolicking nymphs. Bon appétit!

The Groundhog munched, both cheeks bulging. “Beautiful job with that Canadian donkey,” he said once his squid was finally dispatched. “That’s right, why not start out big? Why not a quarter million?”

“This money is good,” Vladimir said. “The world owes us for the last seventy years. This money is very good.”

They drank bottles of Chardonnay, beaming at each other in the unspoken argot of success. By the fourth bottle, and with the braised hare in pimiento reduction well on his way, the Groundhog got sappy. “You’re the best,” he said. “I don’t care who you are, what tribe you came from. You’re just the greatest.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s true,” the Groundhog said, working fast on the complimentary bread and horseradish paste. “You’re the only one I don’t have to worry about. You’re an adult, a businessman. Do you know what trouble I have with Gusev’s men?” He flipped the Russian bird—the thumb stuck between the index and middle fingers—to a table by the kitchen where members of his bouffant-haired, pinstriped security team were slumped over their empty Jim Beam bottles.

“Oy, tell me,” Vladimir said, shaking his head.

“I’ll tell you,” the Groundhog said. “You know I got problems with the Bulgarians, right? With the whole stripping and prostitution racket on Stanislaus Square? So these men of Gusev’s, these fucking cretins, they go to the Bulgarians’ bar and the usual nonsense starts about the girlfriends, the questions of who fucked who first, and who sucked who where. And when it’s all over they got this one guy, Vladik the Dumpling, that’s the Bulgarians’ number two, actually… They got him strung up by his feet over the bar, and they cut off his dick and his balls, and they bleed him to death! That’s fucking Gusev’s men for you! No brains, no skills, nothing. They cut off a man’s dick and his balls. I said to them, ‘Where do you idiots think you are—Moscow?’ This is Prava, the waiting room to the West, and they’re going around cutting—”

“Right,” Vladimir said.

“They’re cutting—”

“Yes, the mutilation of genitals. I hear you,” Vladimir said. “Where’s the bathroom?” he asked.

After assuring himself of the wholeness of his scrotum and padding it with a layer of crispy Stolovan toilet paper (as if that would stop the revenge-minded Bulgarians!) Vladimir felt the return of good cheer swell up across his nether region. By the time he staggered back to the table he was nearly ebullient. “You’ve got to have a talk with Gusev!” he shouted across the table. “We’re businessmen!”

“You have a talk with him,” the Groundhog said, throwing up his hands. “You tell him, ‘This is how we do business in America, and this is how we do not do business in America.’ A line has to be drawn for those simpletons.”

“Correct, correct, Groundhog,” Vladimir said, quickly toasting with a glass of schnapps. “Only, trust me, you should be the one telling them. They’re not scared of me.”

“They will be scared of you,” the Groundhog said. “As scared as they are of God. Which reminds me, here’s a toast to Kostya and his mother’s health.”

“To a speedy recovery.”

The Groundhog suddenly looked serious. “Volodya, let me speak from the heart. You and Kostya are the future of this organization. I see that now. Before it was fun, sure, run around, blow up a few diners, cut off some dicks, but we got to get serious. This is the nineties. We’re in this… ‘informational age’… we need ‘Americanisms’ and ‘globalisms.’ Do you know where I’m coming from?”

“Oh, yes,” Vladimir said. “I say we call a meeting, the whole organization.”

“Whores and all,” said the Groundhog.

“We’re going to teach them America.”

“You’re going to teach them America.”

“Me?” Vladimir said, swallowing a cognac.

“You,” the Groundhog said.

“Me?” Vladimir feigned surprise yet again.

“You’re the best.”

“No, you’re the best.”

“No, you.”

What happened next was as good an argument for temperance as any. “You’re the top,” Vladimir sang, squeezing in a shot of pear brandy between the lyrics. “You’re the Colosseum.”

He must have been louder than he thought, for the pianist instantly shifted out of his Dr. Zhivago repertoire and struck up Vladimir’s tune. The pianist was, like nearly everyone in Prava, open to suggestions.

“You’re the top,” Vladimir continued even louder, with the Germans around him smiling appreciatively, thrilled, as always, at the prospect of free foreign entertainment at tableside. “You’re the Louvre Museum.”

“Get up and sing, Tovarisch Girshkin!” The Groundhog kicked him hard under the table for encouragement.

Vladimir staggered to his feet, then fell over. A further prod from his employer brought him up again. “You’re the melody from a symphony by Strauss! You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you’re Mickey Mouse!”

The Groundhog leaned in, his expression quizzical, and pointed to himself. “No, no, you’re the Groundhog,” Vladimir whispered reassuringly in Russian. The Groundhog pretended to sigh with relief. Hey, the Hog was a fun fella!

“You’re the top,” Vladimir crackled. “You’re a Waldorf salad. You’re the top. You’re a Berlin ballad…” The waitstaff was trying hard to position a microphone in his direction.

“You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain… You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane.” He wished he could translate one of the lines into German to get an extra kick from the red-faced deutsches Volk, maybe hit them up for a tip or a date. “I’m a lazy lout who’s just about to stop…”

Oh, what a ham you are, Vladimir Borisovich.

“But if baby… I’m the bottom… You-ou-ou’re the top.”

There was a standing ovation greater than at the Joy on poetry night. The Groundhog’s security detail regarded their master uncertainly, as if waiting for the secret code to spring into action and spray the whole room with bullets so that no witnesses to this little musical number would remain. There was cause for alarm, as the Groundhog, doubled over with laughter, slipped under the table like a surfer caught in the undertow, and remained there for some time laughing and hitting his head against the table’s bottom. Vladimir had to coax him out with the lobster claws which, true to the menu, really did sit atop a lime-green spread of kiwi puree.

25. THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE

HE DECIDED TO date Morgan, the nice girl the crowd had picked up at the Joy.

It wasn’t a political decision and not so much an erotic one, although he was attracted to her form and pallor, and, maybe, just maybe, she would make a good Eva to his Juan Perón. But his romantic stirrings extended even beyond public relations. He was lonely for a woman’s company. When he arose from an empty bed, his mornings seemed strange and disjointed; at night, passing out into the comforter, as soft and licentious as it was, was somehow not enough. It was hard to understand. After all the complications that American women had put him through (and would he even be here in Prava if it weren’t for his Frannie?) he still depended on their company to make him feel like a young mammal—so vital, affectionate, and full of sperm. But this time around he would take charge of the relationship. He was beyond the “appendage” stage of following Fran around and swooning at the mere mention of semiotics. It was time for someone innocent and pliable like this Morgan, whoever the hell she turned out to be.

There were several courtship options for him. A great deal of them involved various permutations of chance meetings in clubs, poetry readings, strolls across the Emanuel Bridge, or during the hours spent queuing up at the town’s only laundromat—a hub of expatriate activity. At each of these venues, he, Vladimir, would prove himself superior in intellect, grace, conviviality, and name-dropping, thereby accumulating enough social points to be later cashed in for a date.

Or he could do things the old-fashioned, proactive way and call her up. He decided (since, according to Alexandra, his social coordinator, everything was set for the Eagle to land) to try the latter and rang her from the car phone. But the Stalin-era telephone exchange would not connect the two lovers-to-be; instead of Morgan he kept getting a venerable babushka who by the fifth call rasped that he was a “foreign penis” and should “fuck off back to Germany.”

And so Vladimir buzzed Alexandra instead. She and Morgan had twice done the “girls night out” thing and were becoming fast friends. From Alexandra, yawning and likely in Marcus’s arms, he got Morgan’s address out in the boonies and a few bon mots concerning a young girl’s virtue. He longed to orient his car’s compass in the direction of Alexandra’s suburbs, and to ask her to the movies or wherever it was people went on dates. But he pressed forward, way beyond the river and the preliminary factoryscape, to a quiet stretch of asphalt and a lone and lonely apartment house which seemed as if it had been blown several klicks downwind from its panelak brethren by some bureaucratic storm.

Morgan lived on the seventh floor.

He took an elevator smelling comfortably of kielbasa, whose iron door required his whole being to open and shut (the exercises with Kostya were already proving useful), and knocked on the door of apartment 714-21G.

There was stirring within, a slight creak of springs set against the quiet jabber of television, and Vladimir was instantly afraid that he had been preceded by some large American boy, which would explain both the creaking springs and the television being on on a Friday night.

Morgan opened the door without asking who it was (the way non–New Yorkers have an appalling tendency to do) and she was, to Vladimir’s welcome surprise, alone. In fact, she was extremely alone, with two dumpy television anchors doing the news roundup in Stolovan; on the coffee table a small pizza from the New Town shop where they piled up such daring combinations as apples, melted Edam cheese, and sausage gravy; and on the windowsill a bored cat, a hefty Russian blue, mewing and scratching at the freedom beyond.

Morgan was sporting a pink starfish-shaped rash on her forehead (a distant cousin of the wine-dark splotch on Gorbachev’s head), which she had slathered with a thick layer of cream, and was wrapped up in a lavender terry-cloth robe several sizes too small, the kind one expects to receive upon being consigned to a cut-rate nursing home. “Hey, it’s you!” she said, her round American face smiling perfectly. “What are you doing all the way out here? Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

Vladimir was caught short. Seeing her as she was, he was expecting several minutes of embarrassment from her over the state of her wardrobe and forehead. Embarrassment which, he hoped, would make him look good by comparison and help him press the case for why she should go out with him and fall in love with him too. But here she was, happy to see him, actually willing to admit that she didn’t get many visitors. Vladimir remembered her unsolicited honesty at the Joy when she had first met the Crowd. Now she was coming through with several more heapings of the stuff. What fresh pathology was this?

“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Vladimir said. “I was in the neighborhood on some business, and so I thought…”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Please, entrez. What a mess. You’ll have to excuse me.” She made her way to the couch, and, with the benefit of the snug bathrobe, Vladimir now noticed that her thighs and backside, while not particularly large in and of themselves, were somewhat larger than the rest of her.

Now, why wasn’t she rushing to change out of that ridiculous bathrobe? Didn’t she want to impress her guest? Hadn’t she told Alexandra that she found Vladimir exotic? Of course, Ravi Shankar was exotic, and how many women of Vladimir’s generation would sleep with him? Vladimir briefly entertained the thought that Morgan was comfortable being who she was in her own house, but then dismissed such outlandishness. No, something else was going on.

She closed the pizza box, then dropped a magazine on top of it. As if that would conceal the damning proof of her solitude, thought Vladimir. “Here,” she said. “Make yourself at home. Sit. Sit down.”

“We’re modernizing a factory near here,” Vladimir said, pointing vaguely to the window where he assumed another factory in need of a tune-up lay in wait. “It’s very dull work, as you can imagine. Every couple of weeks I have to come in and argue with the foreman about cost overruns. Still, they’re good workers, the Stolovans.”

“I wasn’t doing much myself,” she shouted from what must have been the kitchen, for Vladimir heard water running. She was likely dealing with the creamy buildup on her forehead. “I live so far from the center. Leaving this place is such a bother.”

Such a bother. An older person’s phrase. But said with a young person’s carelessness. Vladimir recalled this kind of paradox from the young Middle American natives he encountered during his college year, and the recollection relaxed him. After they were both settled on the couch and she had brought out a sad little local wine and a paper cup for Vladimir to drink from (the splotch on her forehead remained!), a question-and-answer period followed, one which Vladimir found as familiar as the words to the “Internationale.”

“Where’s your accent from?”

“I am Russian,” Vladimir said, in the grave voice which that admission called for.

“That’s right, Alexandra told me something about that. I studied a little Russian in college, you know.”

“Where did you go?”

“OSU,” she said. “Ohio State.” It sounded perfectly reasonable coming out of her mouth, but it made Vladimir think of the “frat-hog” at the Café Nouveau whose Ohio State T-shirt had made Alexandra laugh.

“So Russian was your major?”

“No, psychology.”

“Ahh…”

“But I took a lot of humanities classes.”

“Ohh…”

Silence.

“Do you remember any Russian?”

She smiled and straightened out a growing partition in her robe, which Vladimir had been watching carefully, feeling piglike and uncouth in his voyeurism. “I just remember a few words…”

Vladimir already knew what those few words were. For some reason, Americans undertaking his impossible language were compelled to say “I love you.” Perhaps this was a legacy of the Cold War. All that suspicion and lack of cultural exchange fueling the desires of young, well-wishing American men and women to bridge the gap, to dismantle those nukes by falling into the arms of some soulful, enigmatic Russian sailor, or his counterpart, the warm and sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl. The fact that, in reality, the soulful Russian sailor was smashed out of his mind half the time and held to a rather loose definition of date rape, while the sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl was covered in pigshit six days out of the week, was fortunately concealed by that gray and nonporous entity, the Iron Curtain.

“Ya vas loobloo,” she said on cue.

“Why, thank you,” Vladimir said.

They laughed and blushed and Vladimir felt himself naturally moving across the couch to be closer to her, although a very safe distance remained. The way her unfashionably long brown hair was coiled limply around her neck, the way it ended in tangles across the faded lavender of the bathrobe made Vladimir feel sorry for her; it aroused him too. She could be so beautiful if she wanted to. Why wasn’t she then?

“So, what are you doing tonight?” he said. “Feel like taking in a movie?”

A movie. That sacred rite of dating which he had never performed. Not with his college girlfriend, the Chicagoan (straight to bed); or Frannie (straight to bar); or even Challah (straight to nervous tears and hiccuping).

And how about “taking one in”? You couldn’t go wrong with a boy who used language like that and probably waved earnestly and said, “Take care, now, hear,” when Uncle Trent took off for the Rotary Club. Accent be damned, you were safe with Vladimir Girshkin.

She squinted at her tiny watch and tapped it purposefully, as if she was on a tight schedule which Vladimir had rudely thrown off-kilter with his dreams of cinema and maybe one of his skinny arms around her shoulders. “I haven’t seen a movie since I got here,” she said.

She scooped up the latest Prava-dence, and leaned toward Vladimir to hold the paper aloft for them both. Despite her being disheveled and marooned on a Friday night, a clean smell emerged from the crux of her uplifted arms. Was there ever a time when American women weren’t so extraterrestrially clean? He really wanted to kiss her.

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation’s sensitive people.

Morgan excused herself to the bathroom to change (finally!) while Vladimir took in her room, lovingly filled with mass-manufactured knickknacks from both the New World and the Old, which lined several plywood “instant” shelves: a fading charcoal drawing of Prava’s castle, a tiny moss-green mermaid statue from Copenhagen, a cracked beer stein from some place called the Great Lakes Brewing Company, a blown-up photo of a fat, disembodied hand dangling a striped bass (Dad?), a framed flyer advertising an industrial noise band named “Marty and the Fungus” (old boyfriend?), and a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat. The only incongruous item was a large poster illustrating the Foot in all its Stalinist glory leaning precariously over the Old Town Hall. Beneath it, a Stolovan slogan: “Graždanku! Otporim vsyechi Stalinski çudoviši!” Vladimir could never be sure of the funny Stolovan language, but translated into normal Russian this could be an exhortation along the lines of “Citizens! Let us take the ax to all of Stalin’s monstrosities!” Hm. That was a little unexpected.

He closed his eyes and tried to take all of her in—the warm round face, the serious gaze, the awkward little mouth, the soft body bundled in terry cloth, the harmless errata on her shelf. Yes, there were probably quirks and inconsistencies in her personality with which Vladimir would eventually have to contend, but, at present, she certainly made for a wonderful demographic. Vladimir, too, could make himself into a pretty good demo: his recent income ranked him in the upper ten percent of U.S. households, and he believed in monogamy with a sad kind of romantic fierceness that would certainly put him ahead of most men in the polls. Yes, the numbers were right; now the magical American love thing had to happen, which it usually did when the numbers were right.

And then he noticed that she was out of the bathroom and talking to him about something… What was it? The Foot? He had been looking at the Foot poster. What was she saying? Down with Stalin? Up with the people? She was definitely saying something about the Foot and the long-put-upon Stolovan nation. But despite her insistent tone, Vladimir was too busy thinking about a strategy to make her love him to hear the particulars of what she was saying. Yes, it was time for the love thing to happen.

WELL, SHE DID look good after her makeover! She was dressed in a little silk blouse which, she must have been aware, defined her contours closely, and had her hair completely up, save for a few stray wisps that fell out of the bun adorably, after a fashion he had seen in contemporary New York subway ads. Perhaps later he could take her to Larry Litvak’s cocktail party—to which he had been invited by phone, postcard, and several gooey encounters with the man himself—and, once there, show her exactly where Vladimir Girshkin was lodged in Prava’s social firmament.

The theater was in the Lesser Quarter, meters from the Emanuel Bridge and close enough to the castle to be in audible range of the bells of its cathedral. Like all real estate of its caliber the theater was crammed with young foreigners, the bulk of them wearing black-and-orange down jackets and baseball caps with logos of American sports teams worn backward. This was the year’s fall fashion-statement for that hideously sterile human mass expanding via satellite from Laguna Beach to Guangdong Province—the international middle class—and it made Vladimir yearn for winter and heavy overcoats and the end of the tourist season, as if there would ever be an end.

On the plus side, the global men all stared at Vladimir’s date as if she was the living embodiment of the reason they slaved away night and day at their engineering textbooks and accounting software, and the looks they reserved for him, that goateed shrimp of a poet, were enough to demonstrate for those of a Catholic disposition envy’s place among the seven deadly ones.

As for the women, bah! all those jangling gold bracelets and tight V-neck sweaters were for naught—no one, not the Bengali heiress nor the lawyer from Hong Kong wore her finery with such confidence and familiar grace as the candidate from Shaker Heights, Ohio. (During the anxious ride into the center, he had learned the name of the particular Cleveland suburb where Morgan grew tall and fair.)

Right! No matter which gender he encountered that night it certainly seemed that this whole enterprise, this date, had gotten off on the right foot, and to celebrate Vladimir bought at the concession stand a minibottle of Becherovka, the hideous Czech liqueur that tasted of burnt pumpkin. And for the lady, a little flask of the Hungarian booze called Unicom, which, despite its lingual similarity to a United Nations relief agency, was the source of innumerable atrocities to the stomach and its sensitive lining.

“Cheers!” They clinked their drinks and, predictably, Morgan gagged and coughed as would any mortal this side of the Danube, while Vladimir comforted her with improvised manliness, even touched her sweaty hand a little, out of concern, and wanted for a brief second to live forever in such circumstances (i.e., being manly; being envied; touching her, if only at the extremities). But then the lights went down and the mating ritual, such as it was, became a bit murky for Vladimir since there was little opportunity for him to try out his witticisms and even less occasion to put on the moves. How could he, after all, with half the audience sniffling and bawling as the attractive hero on the screen became more and more emaciated with the progression of the awful disease, eventually to lose his hair then pass away by the closing credits?

What a scene there was then! By the time the curtains went down noses were trumpeting throughout the theater as if the castle walls outside belonged to ancient Jericho. But Morgan’s face was placid, if a little glazed over, and they stumbled wordlessly to the exit sign and into the street. They stood, still silent, watching the Fiat taxis being commissioned by departing moviegoers while the first drunken processions of Italian university students loudly made their way past the ominous shadow of an adjacent powder tower to some disco wonderland beyond.

Vladimir couldn’t wait to vent. “I hated it!” he shouted. “Hated it! Hated it!” He did a little dance in the shadows of the flickering street lamps, as if to demonstrate the primordial force of his hatred. But it was time for some kind of intellectual breakdown, so he said: “How trite. How revoltingly simple-minded. To turn AIDS into yet another courtroom drama. As if the only way Americans can express anything anymore is through legal proceedings. I’m so utterly underwhelmed.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think just making this movie was a good thing. So many people have issues. Especially where I come from. My little brother and his friends can be such homophobes. They just don’t know any better. At least, this movie talks about AIDS. Don’t you think that’s important?”

What? What the hell was she quacking about? Who gave a fuck what her brother thought about queers. The point was the movie failed as a work of art! Art! Art! Weren’t the Americans here in Prava for art? Why the hell was she here? A little reasoned rebellion before grad school? A chance to show off to the suburban losers in Shaker Heights: “That’s me and my Russian ex-boyfriend in front of the hotel where Kafka took an important crap in 1921. See that plaque by the door? Pretty nifty, huh?” He hadn’t even bothered to ask Morgan what she was doing here in Prava, but the sad alternatives—teaching American English to local businessmen or waitressing the breakfast shift at Eudora’s—were all too obvious. Oh, there was so much he needed to show her. So much she needed to know about the society in which she had landed. Yes, he would go the extra kilometer for this sweet Cleveland cutie. Those hale little cheeks. That nose.

“Well,” he said after a little while had passed and a weak-willed burst of rain had made them a little wet. “I certainly need a drink after that turkey.”

“How about Larry Litvak’s cocktail party?” she said.

So she had been invited, damn it! Now the burning question of our times was: Why, earlier, had she been by herself in her panelak watching television with the cat? Perhaps she was getting ready—the shower, the bathrobe, the ointment on the forehead. Or, worse yet, she didn’t even care about Larry Litvak’s party. Devil confound it all! thought Vladimir to himself in Russian, a phrase that floated in angry and unannounced whenever his worldly disequilibrium mounted to truly Dostoyevskian proportions.

“I also know of a little out-of-the-way club,” he ventured. “No one’s ever heard of it, and there’s plenty of actual Stolovans.” But she insisted on the cocktail party, and now there was nothing to do but go. As if to underscore the situation, Jan and the Beamer pulled up stealthily behind them and started flashing their headlights for attention. The evening was set.

BUT ALL WAS not lost, not by a long shot. When they opened the door to Larry’s pad, the multitudes did let loose with a tumbler-shaking “VLAAAAD!” and, of course, cried out nothing to the barely known Morgan, although surely she was admired in a silent way.

Larry Litvak lived, per his astronaut story, in the Old Town, actually on the outskirts of the Town, bordering Prava’s sprawling bus terminal, which, like all bus terminals, exuded nothing but rankness and ill-health, and was populated by a cast of characters fit for a television exposé.

The lights were down, way down, reminding Vladimir of college parties where the less one could discern of one’s companions, the more distant beds would rumble by the early morning’s light. Still, Vladimir could see that this was a spacious flat, built in the booming interwar period when Stolovans were still expected to live in apartments larger than their dachshunds’ quarters. In fact, the ceilings were so high, the place could have been mistaken for a SoHo loft, but reality abounded in the scary, socialist furniture—the squat, utilitarian divans and easy chairs outfitted in the kind of furry, worsted material that the babushkas enjoyed wearing on cold days. As if to accentuate his furniture’s prickly quality, Larry had installed three bergamots in the center of the main room and had placed miniature floodlights beneath them so that their craggy branches spread unsettling shadows against the ceiling and walls.

“It’s quite a place,” Vladimir shouted to Morgan over the din, with the implied knowledge of having been there many times before. Morgan looked to him in incomprehension. Things were happening too fast: there were hands being thrust at Vladimir from left and right, some already wet and reeking of gin, not to mention the frequent hugs and mouth-to-mouth kisses Vladimir received from impassioned well-wishers. Clearly, the young lady wasn’t used to a Girshkin-sized social persona. Did she have any choice now other than to love him?

They were carried by the crush of people into a kitchen smoothly lit with candles where Larry was situated, his bong working overtime, and several of Prava’s more hippielike denizens swaying to Jerry Garcia, their expressions blank, their bodies loose and loafy like palm trees caught in the wind. “Hey, man,” said Larry, dressed in a transparent black kimono, which revealed in its entirety his sinewy but muscular frame—the show-off. He hugged Vladimir tightly until the latter could feel every part of him.

“Hey, man,” he kept repeating, and Vladimir fondly recalled his high school days when he and Baobab and the rest of them were always stoned and would spend the day mumbling: “Hey, man… don’t eat that thing, man… that thing is for later, man…” Oh, the innocence of those days, that brief period in the Reagan/Bush era when the sixties had returned to American high schools in force. The stooped posture, the half-closed eyes, the hundred-word vocabulary. Oh.

The hippies were introduced, their names sliding in and out of memory. The pièce de résistance, the bong almost a meter in length, was wheeled around for the guest of honor. Larry bent down to light it while Vladimir sucked on the rancid mouthpiece, then passed it to Morgan who tackled it like a good sport.

SATISFIED, VLADIMIR TOOK her arm and they floated back into the main room, scarcely remembering to tell the “we’ll be right back” party lie to Larry Litvak and company. Here, there was another crush around Vladimir and his date, this one consisting entirely of tall, elegant men in chinos, wire-rims, and nose rings plying Vladimir with drinks, mentioning by name Cagliostro and (surprisingly) PravaInvest, then cheerfully prodding their women friends into the foreground for brief introductions. This whole setup was reminiscent of a nineteenth-century ball in the Russian provinces, when the local society men had spotted the general arrived fresh from Petersburg and then closed in on him full of platitudes and talk of business, toting their beautiful wives behind them as a sign of their own rank and good breeding.

The year 1993? Well, such anachronisms could have been a sign of the much-discussed Victorian revival. And while it was shocking for Vladimir to meet these non-Bohemians who wore their nose rings out of fashion and not rebellion, it struck an old, aristocratic chord in him (for in the early twentieth century the Girshkins had owned three hotels in the Ukraine) and he responded with a mounting sense of noblesse oblige: “Yes, pleased to meet you… Of course, I’ve heard of you… We ran into each other at the Martini Bar at the Nouveau… Such pleasant circumstances… This is Morgan, yes… And you are?… And this is?…”

Of course, being under the liberating influence of a meter’s worth of dope quickly added hilarity to the proceedings, setting Vladimir’s mind at ease as he floated above the masses and their babbling and screeching and clucking. Soon his Russian accent emerged in force, lending Count Girshkin an aura of authenticity, which left the fair representatives of Houston and Boulder and Cincinnati twice enamored of the small poet and businessman around whom all of Prava’s expatriate world would now seem to revolve.

He felt Morgan tugging at his sleeve, no longer amused at being marginalized. “Let’s find Alexandra,” she whispered and, whether she meant it or not, touched Vladimir’s ear with her balmy nose.

“Let’s,” Vladimir said, and he put his arm around her and squeezed the broad Ohioan shoulders, so healthy and amenable to squeezing.

They broke through the cordon of well-wishers and arrived at the bergamots which, swaying from the winds of a distant fan, scratched at Vladimir’s face until he stopped to look stupidly at his arboreal assailants as if to say: “Don’t you know who I am?”

Behind the little trees they saw a long, satin couch flanked by similar recliners on which the Crowd had decamped along with several martini decanters and entire carafes of curaçao. They sat laughing and passing judgment without stop at those around them like some hastily assembled Style Council. Occasionally they entertained outsiders who approached with little bundles of paper bearing words or drawings, and sometimes with little computer disks. It seemed that the upcoming first issue of Cagliostro had swelled their heads nicely; a frontal assault by Mexican bees would have proved superfluous.

Cohen spotted them amid the shrubbery: “There he is! Vladimir!”

“Morgan!” Alexandra shouted with something like awe, determined to raise the standing of her newfound friend.

The couple approached and a glittering sky-blue divan was rolled out for them as if by the Devil’s command. Alexandra kissed Morgan on both cheeks, while Vladimir shook hands with the boys and sweetly kissed Alexandra on one cheek, and was kissed, in turn, on both.

The boys had outdone themselves, channeling the glam-nerd look into a formal direction: ash-brown sports jackets and shirts of mourning hues with morose little ties snaking down to their bellies. Alexandra wore a new taupe riding jacket, evidently from one of Prava’s more accomplished antique shops, beneath which was her customary black turtleneck and matching tights.

But one was missing from the group. “And where is Maxine?” Vladimir said, biting his tongue as he remembered that the Expat Dating Committee had already slated the Girshkin-Maxine nuptials for early next spring, and here he was, playing the field with Morgan.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned Maxine, a look passed over Morgan’s face, the look of a child lost in a crowded train station, and Larry’s party was, of course, infinitely stranger than any of the world’s train stations and just as crowded. “Maxine’s taken ill,” Alexandra said. “Nothing serious. She’ll be up on her feet tomorrow.”

The “up on her feet” business was evidently meant to discourage Vladimir from attempting any change in the woman’s verticality. Clearly, Alexandra had told Morgan everything she needed to know about Vladimir’s steamy nonaffair with Maxine.

The situation was unwittingly defused by the excited Cohen who hadn’t seen Vladimir in a couple of days and all but jumped on him. “My friend needs to step to the bar,” he shouted, roaring drunk. “You girls talk among yourselves.” Vladimir looked back at Morgan, worried about leaving her behind. Fortunately, the sight of two attractive women, Morgan and Alexandra, chatting with gusto had the effect of keeping potential suitors at bay. The predatory young men of Prava were easily confounded by the phenomenon of women making do without them.

At the bar, a tiny affair jutting out of an oak bookshelf filled with the collected works of Papa Hemingway, the patron saint of the expatriate scene, the irrepressible Cohen attempted to fix Vladimir a gin and tonic by spilling vodka all over his new imported loafers. When informed by the laughing Vladimir that gin not vodka went into a gin and tonic, Cohen spilled that on him too.

“So, you’ve been tying one on,” Vladimir said.

“I’ve been tying one on for the past five years,” Cohen said. “I’m what in the liquor industry is called an alcoholic.”

“Me too,” Vladimir said. He had never given the matter much thought, but the words certainly rang true.

“Well, let’s drink to that!” cried Vladimir in an effort to shoo away the approaching discomfort, and they clinked their glasses.

“Speaking of tying one on,” Cohen said, “Plank and I are ready for a major bout with the bottle tomorrow. To the finish!” He winked in the direction of the bar.

“I see,” Vladimir said. He saw Cohen and Plank as two pugilists duking it out, slow-motion, with a sweating bottle of Stoli in some sort of performance-art piece.

“You care to join us? None of this shit. Just the three of us. The men.” Then, without warning—and when did he ever give warning?—Cohen threw his arms around Vladimir and squeezed hard. By this time the lights had been dimmed to the degree where the two of them looked like yet another couple on the express checkout lane to bed. The frightened Vladimir peeked out from within his friend’s grasp and tried to maneuver an arm free to signal to the crowd and Morgan that this was not his idea of a good time, but he was hard-pressed to think of the appropriate signal. Anyway, Cohen soon let go and Vladimir saw to his welcome relief that a critical mass had been reached in the room and nobody gave much of a damn about anyone else, really. Even unabashed homosexual sex with the accompanying grunts broadcast over the stereo system would probably go unnoticed for several minutes.

“Aww, we miss you, man,” Cohen said. “You’re so busy with work and…” He stopped, tired of sounding like a jilted lover.

Across the room Vladimir saw Plank looking disgustedly into his drink as if he had been slipped a diuretic, while on the couch next to him Alexandra and Morgan gestured up a storm of conversation. What was it with these disconsolate young men? Was being the cornerstone of Prava’s elite not enough for them? Did they expect to lead meaningful lives as well? “All right,” Vladimir said. “We’ll go out by ourselves. We’ll have a good time. We’ll drink. We’ll get drunk. All right?”

“All right!” shouted Cohen. Brightening, he reached for a bottle, even as Vladimir saw Morgan glancing his way, pointing discreetly at her watch. Did she want to leave already? With Vladimir in tow? Was she not having a good time? No one eloped from a Larry Litvak party before the clock struck three in the morning. It was simply good manners.

“So how’s your writing?” Vladimir asked Cohen.

“Pitiful,” said Cohen, his big lips quivering characteristically. “I’m too in love with Alexandra to even write about her anymore…”

And there was the crux of the problem—love had come to town and Plank and Cohen had bought time shares in that ever-expanding development. Judging by Cohen’s trembling lips and wet eyes, he was already in Phase III, by the lapping pool and the Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course.

“So don’t write about her,” came a stern, gravelly voice, which Vladimir first imagined might belong to Cohen’s grandfather on his Jewish side, arrived in Prava for the approaching high holy days. He looked about for the source until Cohen pointed downward and said, “I’d like you to meet the poet Fish, also from New York.”

The poet Fish was not a midget but he brushed by that category with little room to spare. He looked like an unwashed twelve-year-old, and his hair was thick and matted, an overturned bowl of ramen noodles; despite all this he had the voice of Milton Berle. “Charmed,” the poet said offering Vladimir his hand as if he expected it to be kissed. “Everyone’s talking about Vladimir Girshkin,” he said. “It was the first thing I heard at the baggage carousel.”

“Stop it!” Vladimir said. To himself he thought: And what do they say?

“Fish is staying with Plank for a couple of days,” Cohen said. “He’s been published by an Alaskan literary journal.” And then Cohen turned instantly pale as if he had just seen someone across the room, someone who tugged at his memory in a most inopportune way. Vladimir even followed the dim light of his eyes to see who it might be, but then Cohen simply said: “I’ve got to go and retch,” and the mystery was solved.

“So,” Vladimir said, now that Cohen had left the dwarf on his hands (he hoped the little guy at least looked exotic to others). “A poet, huh?”

“Listen here,” the poet said, rising on his tippy-toes to breathe into Vladimir’s chin. “I heard you got a little something going here, this PravaInvest shit.”

“Little?” Vladimir fanned out like a peacock upon sighting his mate-to-be. “We’re capitalized with over thirty-five billion U.S. dollars…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the poet Fish. “I’ve got a business proposition for you. Ever snorted horse tranquilizer?”

“I beg?”

“Horse tranquilizer. Just how long exactly have you been out of The City?”

Vladimir presumed he meant New York City and was shocked to remember that no matter what they did out here in Prava and Budapest and Cracow, The City—that long grid of blasted streets and no apologies—still remained the bull’s-eye of the galaxy. “Two months,” he said.

“It’s everywhere,” Fish said. “In all the clubs. You can’t be an artist in New York and not snort the horse. Trust me, I know.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s like a frontal lobotomy. It clears your head out when there’s gridlock. You think of nothing. And here’s the best part—it lasts only fifteen minutes per snort. After that you’re back to doing your thing. Some even report having a renewed sense of self. Of course, that’s mainly the prose writers. They’ll say anything.”

“Are there any side effects?” Vladimir asked.

“None. Let’s go out on the balcony. I’ll show you.”

“Let me think—”

“That’s precisely what you don’t want to do. Look, I’ve got this veterinarian near Lyon, he’s on the board of a major pharmaceutical there. We can corner the Eastern European market with your PravaInvest. And what’s a more likely distribution point than Prava?”

“Yes, well,” Vladimir said. “But is it legal?”

“Sure,” Fish said.

“Why not?” he added, seeing that the matter was not yet put to rest.

“Well, it helps if you own a horse,” he said finally. “I just bought a couple of sickly ones down in Kentucky. Come on already.” And he led him out of the room, as Morgan and Alexandra stared from their couch, alarmed at the strange spectacle of PravaInvest’s executive vice president following intently on the heels of a leprechaun.

The balcony overlooked the bus terminal, which, despite the majestic glint of the full moon, remained a tortured patchwork of cement and corrugated metal.

And then there were the buses:

From the West came the two-story, deluxe models with television screens flickering and air-conditioners tracing their green exhaust against the asphalt. These would disgorge streams of clean, young backpackers from Frankfurt, Brussels, and Turin, who immediately set to celebrating their newfound East Bloc freedom by showering each other with roadside Uneskos, flashing peace signs to the waiting cabbies.

From the East came the appropriately named IKARUS buses: terminally ill, their low, gray frames shuddering to the finish line; the doors opening slowly and obstinately to let out the tired families from Bratislava and Kosice, or the aging professionals from Sofia and Kishinev who held their briefcases close to their sparkling polyester suits as they made their way to the nearby metro station. And Vladimir could almost smell these briefcases, which, like his father’s, likely contained the leftovers of a meaty lunch packed for the road, leftovers that might now serve as dinner—Golden Prava was getting expensive for the average Bulgarian.

But Vladimir’s examination of this unhappy dichotomy, a dichotomy which was in some ways the story of his life, which brought on feelings of both elation and remorse—the elation of having a special, privileged knowledge of both East and West, the remorse of fitting finally into neither—was interrupted by the stinging, crystal-edged horse powder which the poet Fish administered to him nasally and then

not

much

happened.

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. Something, of course, happened, even while Vladimir withdrew into the upper stories of his brain where the thin mountain air was not conducive to the cognitive process. The buses kept arriving and departing but now they were just buses (buses, you know, transport, point A to point B) and Fish rolling up and down the balcony naked, howling, and waving his tiny purple penis at the moon was just a young man with his purple penis, howling. Nothing much was happening in a big way. In fact, nonexistence was no longer so unfathomable (and how many times had he, as a morose child, shut his eyes and plugged his ears with cotton, trying to imagine The Void), but rather a fairly natural progression of this goofy happiness. The floating, bottomless joy of anesthesia.

And then the fifteen minutes were up and, like clockwork, Vladimir was noiselessly airlifted into his body; Fish was putting on his clothes.

Vladimir stood up. He sat down. He got up again. Anything for sensory experience. He sliced at his fingers with his business card for a bit, before presenting it to the poet. Very enjoyable. He was ready to plunge into the Tavlata.

“I’ll send you a starter kit with instructions,” Fish was saying. “And also some of my poetry.”

“I have fallen under the influence of John Donne,” he added, buttoning up his funky elfin tunic.

“SO, ARE YOU a good person?” Morgan asked.

It was five in the morning. After the party. An island in the middle of the Tavlata, connected to the Lesser Quarter by a single footbridge of uncertain origin; an isle that seemed all but abandoned by Prava’s vague municipal services; an overgrown jumble of mammoth trees and the little shrubs that clung to them the way baby elephants rub up against the feet of their mothers. They were sitting on the grass behind a tremendous oak with its boughs fully leafed despite the advance of autumn; this redoubtable old-timer welcomed in the passing seasons at his own discretion. On the other side of the footbridge, high above them, moonlight fell on the spindly buttresses of the castle’s cathedral, giving St. Stanislaus the appearance of a giant spider which had somehow scampered over the castle walls and settled in for the night.

The question was whether or not he was a good person.

“I have to preface this by saying I’m drunk,” he said.

“I’m drunk, too. Just tell the truth.”

The truth. How did it come to this? Just a minute ago he was kissing her alcohol-soaked mouth, feeling under her armpits for the wetness he loved, rubbing himself against her thigh, getting a voyeuristic excitement from the passing beam of his car’s headlights—devoted Jan was keeping an eye on them from the embankment.

“Speaking comparatively, I’m a better person than most I know.” This was a lie. He had only to think of Cohen to know he was lying. “All right, I’m not a great person per se, but I want to be a good person to you. I’ve been good to others in the past.”

What the hell kind of conversation was this? She was leaning against a rotting log next to some kind of sacrificial heap of used Fanta cans and condom wrappers; her hair was tangled with weeds; there was a lipstick smudge on the tiny, retroussé tip of her nose; and Vladimir’s dribble was hanging from her chin.

Was Vladimir a good person? No. But he mistreated others only because the world had mistreated him. Modern justice for the postmorality set.

“You want to be good to me,” she was saying, her voice surprisingly steady, even as she drunkenly tipped back and forth from the slightest breeze.

“Yes,” Vladimir said. “And I’d like to know you better. Unquestionably.”

“You really want to hear about what it was like to grow up in Cleveland? In a suburb? My family? Being the oldest child? The only girl? Um… Basketball camp? Can you fathom a girls’ basketball camp, Vladimir? In Medina County, Ohio? What’s more, do you even care? Do you want to know why sometimes I’d rather be out camping than in a café? How I hate reading other people’s poems just because I have to? And how I hate listening to people all the time like your friend Cohen when he starts going on about his damn Paris in the twenties?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said. “I want to know all of it. Absolutely.”

“Why?”

It wasn’t an easy question. There were no tangible answers. He would have to make something up.

While he was thinking, a brisk wind started and the clouds rolled northward, so that when he lifted his head straight up and ignored the fact that he was at the very epicenter of the city, it was possible to imagine the island afloat and traveling south, navigating the twists and bends of the Tavlata until it finally emerged in the Adriatic Sea. A little more sailing then and they could beach their island ship on the shores of Corfu; frolic amid the rustle of tiny olive trees, the harmonies of the goldfinches. Anything to survive this interrogation.

“Look,” Vladimir said. “You hate it when Cohen starts talking Paris and the whole cult of the expatriate. But I have to say: There is something to it. The most beautiful three lines in literature that I’ve ever read are the very last lines of Tropic of Cancer. Now let me lay down the caveats first: By saying what I’m saying, I’m not sanctioning the misogynist, race-baiting Henry Miller as a human being, and continue to cast grave doubts on his abilities as a writer. I am only expressing my admiration for the last few lines of this particular novel… Anyway, Henry Miller is standing by the banks of the Seine, he’s been through just about every kind of poverty and humiliation possible. And he writes something like (and excuse me if I’m misquoting): ‘The sun is setting. I can feel this river flowing through me—its soil, its changing climate, its ancient past. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.’”

He wiggled his hand in between her two warm palms. “I don’t know if I’m a good person or a bad person,” Vladimir said. “Perhaps it’s not possible to know. But right now I am the happiest man alive. This river—its soil, its climate, its ancient past—being with you at five in the morning in the middle of this river, in the middle of this city. It makes me feel—”

She pressed his own hand to his mouth. “Stop it,” she said. “If you don’t want to answer my question, then don’t. But it’s something I want you to think about. Oh, Vladimir! Listen to you! Not sanctioning some poor Henry Miller as a human being. I’m not even sure what you mean, but I know it’s not pretty…” She turned away from him, and he was left to stare into the stern little bun of her hair.

“Look, I like you,” she said suddenly. “I really do. You’re smart and sweet and clever, and I think you want to do right by people. You’ve really brought the community together with Cagliostro, you know. You’ve given a lot of people their first chance. But I feel that… in the long run… that you’ll never really let me into your life. I feel that after spending just one day with you. And I wonder if it’s because you think I’m just this idiot from Shaker Heights, or whether there’s something terrible you don’t want me to know.”

“I see,” Vladimir said. His mind was racing for an answer but there was little he could say that would make her believe him. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, it was best not to say anything.

On the bank opposite the castle, the first touches of dawn were setting light to the gold dome of the National Theater that flared above the black toes of Stalin’s Foot like a holy bunion; a tram full of early workers was crossing a nearby bridge with enough rumble to send tremors through their little isle. And just then the wind turned ugly, conspiring with Vladimir’s plan to wrap his arms around her. Her silk blouse provided poor traction for his embrace, but he could feel her, infinitely warm and solid and smelling of sweat and spent kisses. “Shh,” she whispered, guessing correctly that he was about to speak.

Why couldn’t she make this easy for him? Weren’t his lies and evasions valid enough? And yet, here she was, Morgan Jenson, a tender but unsettling prospect, reminding Vladimir of someone he used to be before Mr. Rybakov stumbled into his life with news of a world beyond Challah’s desperate grasp. A soft and unsurefooted Vladimir, whose mornings were crowned with a double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. Mother’s Little Failure. The man on the run.