The Russian Debutante's Handbook

26. THE LONG MARCH

HE HAD NEVER seen such strong legs.

A month had passed since Larry Litvak’s party, but those legs—firm white flesh mottled by young blue veins, each thigh a stanza of socialist realism—continued to thrill and beguile young Vladimir. Waking up in Morgan’s panelak apartment at an ungodly seven in the morning, Vladimir saw the aforementioned legs, thick, muscular, perhaps a bit unfeminine to his unenlightened eyes, and, what was the word, springy? She sprang out of bed on those legs, rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed and rinsed and prepared herself for a long day’s work. These were legs that had been put to the toughest use from early age, and each day of basketball camp had only added to their agility and muscular heft. And now these legs, if the occasion ever warranted, could easily have piggybacked Vladimir across Mount Elbrus.

But instead of Mount Elbrus, the legs we have spoken of, firm like eggplants in a pair of denims and hiking boots, were soon put to use at a Stolovan national park, a basin of green between two rocky cliffs two hundred kilometers to the north of Prava. Surprisingly, the home-loving Vladimir was called upon to accompany her through this wilderness. He had had Jan drop them off at the mouth of the park, and then, with Morgan’s sturdy legs supporting a foldup tent tethered to her back, they crossed an interminable vista of underbrush-clogged forest, rills expanding into proper streams capped off with foamy waterfalls, a meadow, which served as the home to an unpredictable deerlike animal that peeked out of the tall grass with its dark liquid eyes. Finally, the sweating, grunting Vladimir, holding onto a walking stick with one hand and carrying a little sack of Chinese apples in the other, found himself on a granite ledge overlooking a minilake where fish, frogs, and dragonflies commuted to and from the various mossy shores. Vladimir breathed in the clean air, felt Kostya’s spirit smile approvingly from a nearby tree, and watched Morgan take off her tent-pack and begin to assemble the damn thing.

“Hello, creation!” he shouted, spitting onto a lily pad that bobbed along indifferently. Despite nature’s dictatorial regime, its cult of greenness, he had found himself enjoying their two-hour hike, the way the landscape trembled before him, animals scampering, tree branches giving way, and now came the real payoff—a rare chance to be completely alone with his new friend in a queer and beautiful place.

It was about time. They had barely spent one daylight hour together in the weeks following Larry’s fête. Just as Vladimir had suspected, Morgan worked as an English teacher. She held a ten-hour-a-day job imparting the language to a mostly proletarian audience in the suburbs, aspirants to Prava’s burgeoning service industry who wanted to say, “Here is a clean bath towel,” and “Would you like me to call the police now, sir?”

Teaching English was the standard job for those Americans in Prava who didn’t have full parental backing, and Morgan went about it in her own methodic way—responsibility über alles—ignoring all of Vladimir’s attempts to get her to play hooky and spend the day running around with him. Vladimir was sure that all of her male students were in love with her and had asked her out many times for coffee and drinks in the quick-fire, automatic way of European men trying to seduce American women. He was also sure that she would immediately turn red enough to make all but the most incorrigible lotharios reconsider their attack and would say in her slow, tutorial way: “I have boy friend.”

HE WATCHED HER dig her heels into the dry autumn soil and then start to hoist the tent canvas over a pair of sticks. Her legs were never as beautiful to Vladimir as when they were folded over her great big bottom, the way they were at present. He felt the stirrings of excitement and pressed a palm against his groin, when he was distracted by that thing with feathers: bird.

“Hawk!” Vladimir cried as the predator circled overhead, its terrifying beak pointed at his person.

Morgan was banging another stick into the ground with a rock. She wiped her forehead and breathed hot breath down her shirt. “A partridge,” she said. “Why don’t you help me set this up? You don’t like to exert yourself very much, do you? You’re sort of a… I don’t know how to describe you… A chewer of cud.”

“I’m a capital loss,” Vladimir confirmed. A chewer of cud. That was clever! She was catching on. The Crowd was working its magic.

He held the tent’s canvas in place, while she worked the rocks and sticks. He watched over her with quiet admiration, trying to picture a brown-haired girl, pretty but not the prettiest in her sixth grade, squashing mosquitoes against her forehead on a back porch; at her feet, a partly deflated rubber toy lying on its side, a dinosaur from a television cartoon; waterlogged cards on the patio table, slimy to the touch, their reds and yellows running together, a diamond knave without a head; upstairs in the master bedroom the last tremors of an inconsequential fight between Mother and Father about some instance of jealousy, a petty humiliation, or perhaps just the boredom of this particular life with its summer hot dogs, pennant championships, lake effect winds, November democracy, the raising of three children with strong springy legs and big hands that reached out to touch and comfort, that hoisted fat little bodies up elm trees to frighten squirrels out of nests, offered up basketballs to the permanently gray skies, pitched tent stakes into the ground…

Here Vladimir stopped. What did he know? What could he know of her childhood? It was poor luck, a sun-blinded stork that had plucked him down at the Birthing House on Tchaikovsky Prospekt and not the famed Cleveland Clinic. Ach, the old questions of the beta immigrant: How did one go about changing one’s warbling tongue, one’s half-destroyed parents, the very stink of one’s body? Or, more personally: how did he, Vladimir, end up here, a third-rate criminal in the middle of a crisp European forest, watching a tent going up lakeside, a tough, handsome, and yet entirely unremarkable woman silently building a temporary home for the both of them?

“Are you getting tired?” he asked her with what he thought was real affection, holding on to the canvas with one hand and reaching down to pat her damp hair with the other. She was fussing with a tent pole, a hook, and another implement, and he was touched by the sight of a body more plausible than his, the body of a woman who approached the earth on equal terms; all of her—feet, biceps, kneecaps, spinal column—all of her serving a purpose, whether hopping three trams to the far reaches of Prava, miming down the price of a root vegetable at the Gypsy market, or hacking her way through straw-colored foliage.

Fran, Challah, Mother, Dr. Girshkin, Mr. Rybakov, Vladimir Girshkin, each had invested a lifetime into building a refuge from the world, be it a bed of money, a talking fan, a cordon of books, a rickety basement izba, a shelf of half-empty K-Y jars, a shaky pyramid scheme…But this woman, seen here wielding an awl-type thing over a difficult stake, had nothing in particular to run from. She was on vacation. She could have been puffing grass in Thailand, biking through Ghana, or snorkeling above that infernal Barrier Reef, but she happened to be here, bopping along to the cultural beat of a failed empire with her powerful legs and good disposition. And at some point her vacation would be over and she would go home. He would be waving her good-bye from the tarmac.

“I’m almost finished,” she said.

She was almost finished, which made Vladimir feel sad, prematurely abandoned, angry, in awe, in love, at a loss—many things that somehow came together and expressed themselves as arousal. Those thick legs again. Denim covered in soil. It was a strange feeling, but oddly natural, elemental. “Good,” he said, reaching down to barely touch a warm shoulder. “That’s good.”

She looked at him. It took her a few seconds to gauge the way he was moving from foot to foot, the frisky eyes, the labored breathing, but then she was instantly embarrassed, a young kind of embarrassment “Oh, boy,” she said and looked away, smiling.

They climbed into the perfect little tent and he quickly pressed himself against her, his hands sunk into her natural roundness and he squeezed and he squeezed, gasping for joy, praying he was going to make good with all this squeezing. And then it occurred to him… One word.

Normalcy. What they were doing was inherently normal and right. The tent was a special zone in which desire existed as a normal urge. Here you took off your clothes and your partner did likewise and there would be, hopefully, a great deal of arousal mixed with tenderness. This idea, as clear as the lake glistening outside their tent, scared Vladimir almost to the point of impotence. He squeezed Morgan all the harder and felt dryness in his throat, a sudden need to urinate.

“Hi there,” he said awkwardly. This was becoming a favorite phrase. It made him feel romantic in an informal kind of way, like they were already best friends as well as near-strangers about to get naked.

“Hi there,” she replied in kind. He mechanically pawed at her chest for a few minutes, while she stroked his neck and quivering throat, lifted up his shiny nylon shirt and squeezed his pale stomach, all the while looking him over with an expression that was, if anything, tolerant, attentive, engaged in the problem of Vladimir Girshkin. In the shallow light of the Stolovan sun suffusing the tent with a tawny yellow, she looked older to him, the flesh on her face raw and kneaded, her eyes narrowing gradually in what could have been a flash of tiredness passing for arousal (Vladimir was keen to interpret it as kindness, even a state of grace). There was a jolt of static when he touched her forehead and she smiled sadly for him, at the way her body was electrically charged against his and whispered “ouch” on his behalf.

The repetitive stroking motion was making her listless. She propped her head up on one hand, brushed some thistles off of Vladimir, assayed the situation, realized she had to take charge, unzipped and removed Vladimir’s janitor pants, squeezed out of her own jeans, her freckled, soft skin coloring the air with the earthy aroma of the hiker, and helped Vladimir climb atop of her.

“Hi there,” Vladimir said.

She touched his face absentmindedly and looked away. What was she thinking? Only yesterday she had seen Vladimir and Cohen practically horsewhipping that poor Canadian club owner, that unfortunate Harry Green, over some aspect of the nascent Yugoslav war, and now here he was, Vladimir the conqueror, shivering in the tent’s autumnal chill, rubbing up against her stomach as if he didn’t know quite how to conjoin with a woman, this man who could not put up a tent, who by his own admission could not do much of anything, really, other than talk and laugh and wave his tiny hands and try to be liked by others. She took hold of him and tweaked him with a familiar up-and-down motion, a little rough twist now and again that he seemed to enjoy. He closed his eyes, coughed dramatically, the deep rumble of phlegm echoing through the tent, then issued a kind of moan: “Ma-hum,” Vladimir said. “Aaf,” he concluded.

“Hi there, strange fellow,” she said. It just came out that way, and by her awkward smile Vladimir knew that she immediately wanted to retract it, for she must have felt pity, a halo of sympathy that could also have been a long ray of the voyeuristic sun worming its way between them; but, no, definitely it had been sympathy… Ah, if only he could tell her… Dear Morgan… She had been asking the wrong questions that night in the middle of the Tavlata. He was neither a good or a bad person. The man lying on top of her, goose bumps dotting his chest, little brambles of facial hair pointing in the four major directions, eyes pleading for some sort of release, wet trembling hands cupping her shoulders—this was a wrecked person. How else could someone be so clever and yet so stumped? How else could someone shudder so terribly, so earnestly before an unassuming woman like herself?

He was preparing to address her at length, but just then she lifted him up, took his member off her stomach, guided it where it needed to go. He opened his mouth, and she must have seen bubbles forming at the back of his throat, as if he was struggling to breathe underwater. He stared at her with incredulity. He looked ready to mouth the words “Hi there” one more time. Perhaps to forestall this eventuality, she took hold of his ass and plunged him onward, filling the tent with his happy roar.

27. WHAT IF TOLSTOY WAS WRONG?

THEY WERE DOING well.

Alexandra had taken charge of their relationship from the outset. A kind of free-floating modern yenta, she would call both Vladimir and Morgan every day to make sure everyone’s emotional passport was in order. “The situation looks positive,” she wrote to Cohen in a confidential communiqué. “Vladimir is increasing Morgan’s range of reference, her cynicism is slowly peaking, she no longer looks at the world from a position of middle-American privilege, but at least partly through the eyes of Vladimir, an oppressed immigrant facing systemic barriers to access.

“V, for his part, is learning to appreciate the need for a hands-on dialogue with the physical world. Whether spotted making out with M on the Emanuel Bridge early morning or discreetly patting her down at the premiere of Plank’s cinema-verité extravaganza, this is a side of Vladimir we’re more than happy to acknowledge! What’s next for them, Cohey? Living in sin?”

Morgan’s flat certainly had plenty of space for cohabitation, two tiny bedrooms of a sort and one mysterious room, which was sealed up with duct tape and barricaded by a sofa. A picture of Jan Zhopka, the first Stolovan “working-class president” under the communists, hung over the door to the banned room. Zhopka’s face, a big purple beet with several functional holes for sniffing out bourgeois sentiment and singing agit-prop ditties, was further insulted by a crudely drawn Hitler-cropped mustache.

Vladimir had always wanted to ask about Morgan’s views on the strange times they lived in, the collapse of communism after Reagan’s sucker punch in the mid-80s, but he worried her response would be too typical, reactionary, Midwestern. Why put up an anti-Zhopka poster when all the cool kids were going after the World Bank? He decided to ask her about the sealed room instead.

“The roof is leaking something terrible in there,” Morgan explained the situation in her informal English. They were on the living-room couch, Morgan sitting on top of him, henlike, trying to keep him warm (like most Russians of a certain class, Vladimir had an unnatural fear of drafts). “The landlord sends this guy over every few weeks to patch things up,” she said, “but that room is still a no-go.”

“Europa, Europa,” Vladimir muttered, shifting Morgan from thigh to thigh to keep her warmth circulating. “Half the continent’s under repair. Speaking of, there was some Stolovan guy, a Tomash, I believe, buzzing up yesterday. He kept yelling ‘To-mash is here! To-mash is here!’ I told him I wasn’t interested in any Tomashes, thank you. This neighborhood is full of freaks, by the way. You shouldn’t be out here alone. Why don’t I get Jan to drive you around?”

“Vlad, listen to me!” Morgan turned around and grabbed him by the ears. “Don’t ever let anyone in the apartment! And don’t go near that room!”

“Ai, please, not the ears!” Vladimir squealed. “They’ll be red for hours. I have to officiate at the Vegan Olympics tonight. What’s wrong with you?”

“Promise me!”

“Ai, let go… Yes, of course, I won’t, I swear. Oh, you big corn-fed animal!”

“Stop calling me that.”

“I’m being affectionate. And you are bigger than me. And more corn-fed. It’s identity—”

“Yes, identity politics,” Morgan said. “Anyway, asshole, you told me we’d finally go to your place this weekend. You said you’d finally introduce me to your Russian friends. That guy who called yesterday was so cute and scared. And I’ve never heard of such an exotic name: Surok. Sounds kind of Indian. I looked it up in the dictionary, and I think in Stolovan it means ‘mole’ or ‘marmot’ or something. What does it mean in Russian? And when am I going to meet him? And when are you going to take me to your place? Huh, asshole?” She pulled on his nose, but gently.

Vladimir imagined Morgan and the Groundhog breaking bread at the weekly biznesmenski lunch, with its customary postprandial discharge of weapons, deflowered Kasino girls going down on the Hog to the tune of ABBA’s ‘Take a Chance on Me,’ Gusev drunkenly railing against the Yid-Masonic global conspiracy.

“It’s out of the question,” Vladimir said. “There’s no hot water in the entire panelak until December, the boiler’s leaking sulfites, there’s airborne hepatitis in the elevator…”

And the whole place is the preserve of armed thieves and bandits mostly drawn from the ranks of the former USSR’s toe-crushing, electric shock–happy security organs. “You know, I’ve got to get out of that place,” Vladimir said. “Maybe I should just move in here? We’ll save on rent. What do you pay? Fifty dollars a month? We could split it. Twenty-five each. What do you think?”

“Well,” Morgan said. “That would be fine, I guess.” She plucked a piece of fluff from Vladimir’s chest hair, examined it closely, then set it down in her lap where it floated dreamily along the inseam of her jeans. “Except.”

Minutes passed. Vladimir prodded her stomach. Theirs was a relationship more silent than most he had known, and it suited him well—a lack of words implying a lack of conflict, the sleepy embraces and mutual gargling in the morning articulating a simpler, working-class kind of love. And yet, there were times when her silence seemed misplaced, when she would stare at Vladimir with the same uncertainty she reserved for her cat, an abused local stray who under Morgan’s care had grown to Western proportions and now lived a somber, secret life by the windowsill.

“Except,” Vladimir said.

“I’m sorry…” she said. “I—”

“You don’t want me to move in with you?” She didn’t want Vladimir Girshkin on a dusk-to-dusk basis? She didn’t want to teach him how to scrape mold off the shower curtain? She didn’t want to grow slow and fat with him, the way other couples did in their panelaks? “I’m practically living here as it is,” Vladimir whispered, scaring himself with the sadness of his voice.

She rose from her nesting place, exposing Vladimir to the killer drafts. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said.

“It’s Saturday,” Vladimir protested.

“I’ve got to tutor that rich guy on the Brezhnevska Embankment.”

“What’s his name?” Vladimir said. “Another To-mash?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “Half the men in this country are named Tomaš. It’s kind of an ugly name, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, drawing an enormous goosefeather comforter over himself. “Yes, it is. In any language.” He watched her change into long underwear. He tried to stay angry at her, but the thwock of the underwear’s elastic against that round little belly of hers filled him with feelings of longing and domesticity both. Belly. Long underwear. Goosefeather comforter. He yawned and watched Morgan’s cat yawn in unison across the room.

He’d have to break into that sealed room some other time, when he wasn’t so sleepy. Nobody kept secrets from Vladimir Girshkin. He’d have Jan help him out; Jan loved to smash things in with his shoulder. They were always replacing car windows and such.

And he’d move in with her sooner or later, too. Cohen had shown him Alexandra’s confidential report. There was no other way.

AFTER WORK, VLADIMIR and Morgan would drive into the city and have a kale-and-cabbage lunch at the new Hare Krishna joint, or head for the Nouveau where they drank Turkish coffees and became awake and animated, played footsie to the quick time of Dixieland jazz. But most of the time they spent walking, power-walking, for the November chill was making them brisk. Battling the wind, they would climb to the highest peak of Repin Hill, Prava’s loftiest mountain, a green acropolis crying out for a parthenon. At this altitude, the Old Town across the river resembled a garage-sale assortment of bric-a-brac, the powder towers looking like blackened pepper shakers, the Art Nouveau mansions a collection of gilded music boxes.

“It’s really something,” Morgan once said. “Just look at all those construction cranes by the Kmart. People are going to come here twenty years from now, and they’ll never know what it was like when all this happened. They’ll have to read your poems or Cohen’s poems or Maxine’s metaessays…”

Vladimir was not looking at the golden city but rather in the opposite direction, at an ad-hoc sausage stand, a greasy little bratwurst Imbiß the locals had quickly set up to feed the hungry Germans. “Sure, it’s a special time,” he said, eyeing a plump little wurst curling over a slice of rye, “but we must beware the encroachment of… um… you know… the multinationals.”

“I feel so remarkably at ease here,” Morgan said, ignoring him. “So free of anxiety. There were times in college last year, when I would just stand there in the mailroom and feel this incredible panic. Just this kind of… unexplained… craziness. Have you ever felt like that, Vladimir?”

“Yes, of course,” Vladimir said. He eyed her skeptically. Panic? What could she know of panic? The world lay prostrate at her feet. When one of the big birds, an owl, perhaps, had tried to eat Vladimir in the forest, she had merely to say “Bad!” to the creature in her firm, customer-is-always-right tone, and off it went, hooting miserably into the canopy of trees. Panic? Not likely.

“The blood starts draining from your hands and feet,” Morgan was saying, “and then from your head, too, so that you get dizzy. The campus shrink told me it was a classic panic attack. Have you ever seen a shrink, Vlad?”

“Russians are not keen on psychiatry,” Vladimir explained. “Life is sad for us and so we must bear it.”

“Just asking. Anyway, I would get these panic attacks in the middle of the day, when absolutely nothing was happening. It was strange. I knew I was going to graduate, my grades weren’t so bad, I had some pretty cool friends, I was dating this guy, not the brightest, but you know… College.”

“Ohio,” Vladimir said, trying to create a sense of place for himself. He thought of the progressive Midwestern college he had briefly attended. Nude relay-racing at the workers’ solidarity festival, steamy Get to Know You showers at the dorm, the massive spring-break sexual-identity crisis. They had practically invented panic attacks at that college.

“Yes, Ohio,” Morgan said. “So what I’m saying is, my life was okay. There was nothing wrong with it. I was doing pretty good with my parents. My mother would drive down from Cleveland and I’d be, you know, just walking her to her car and she would start crying and telling me how lucky I was, how pretty, how perfect. It was kind of sweet, but maybe a little weird, too. Sometimes she’d drive down a hundred and fifty miles to Columbus just to give me a new Nordstrom charge card or a six-pack of soda pop, and then turn around and drive right back home. I don’t know. I guess she really missed me. They really fucked up with my brother the year before. Dad sort of press-ganged him into working at the firm one summer and that was just the end… I think he’s in Belize now. We haven’t heard from him since last Christmas. Almost a year now.”

“Mothers,” Vladimir said, shaking his head. He reached over to zip up Morgan’s jacket against the gathering wind.

“Thanks,” Morgan said. “So the shrink would ask me: was I depressed about anything? Was I worried about grades? Was I pre-law? Was I knocked up? And, of course, it was nothing like that… I was just this good kid.”

“Hmm.” Vladimir was vaguely paying attention now. “What do you think it was?” he asked.

“Well, he told me, basically, that the panic attacks were sort of a cover-up. That what I really felt was this incredible anger and that the panic attacks just prevented me from really lashing out. They were like a warning sign, and if I didn’t have them I would do something inappropriate. Maybe, like, vindictive.”

“But that’s not you at all!” Vladimir said. He was genuinely confused now. “What the hell could you have been lashing out at? Look, I don’t know much about the mind, but I know what modernity teaches us: whenever there is some kind of trouble, the parents are usually to blame. But in your case, the mama and the papa sound like perfectly reasonable people.” Yes, from what she told him, they lived in a split-level house on South Woodland Boulevard where they raised Morgan and two other Midwestern children besides.

“They sound pretty all right to me too,” Morgan said. “They only really pressured the boys in the family, even though I was the oldest.”

“Aha!” Vladimir said. “And your other brother, is he also hiding out in Belize?”

“He’s at Indiana. A marketing major.”

“Perfect, then! There’s absolutely no kind of pattern we can discern here.” Vladimir sighed happily. He was getting a little panicky himself. If there was something wrong with Morgan, what hope was there for a Soviet Jew–child like Vladimir Girshkin? She might as well have been saying that Tolstoy was wrong, that all happy families were not alike. “Now, Morgan,” he said, “these panic attacks, would you say they’ve gotten better recently or worse?”

“Actually, I haven’t had any since I came to Prava.”

“I see… I see…” Vladimir clasped his hands together in the manner of Dr. Girshkin contemplating an inquiry from the Department of Health & Human Services. This was a difficult moment in its own right, although it was hard to say why. They were just talking. Two expatriate lovers. No pressure.

“So now let us recall what your psychiatrist said…” Vladimir pressed on. “He said your little panic attacks were some kind of cover-up, that they prevented you from, I believe you said, ‘lashing out.’ Tell me, since you arrived in Prava, have you been doing anything, hmm, to borrow your words, ‘inappropriate’ or ‘vindictive?’”

Morgan thought about it. She looked out over the mythic skyline of the city and then looked to the bare earth. Another of her silent moments, it seemed, was upon them. She was playing with the zipper of her jacket, reminding Vladimir of the Russian word for zipper, molnya, which also meant “lightning.” A pretty word. “Have you been lashing out?” Vladimir prompted her again.

“No,” she said finally. “No, I haven’t.” Suddenly, she embraced him, and brushing against his prickly cheek he felt the familiar dime-sized hollow at the tip of her chin, an indentation that Vladimir had somehow perceived as being inherently sexual, but now considered a telling imperfection, a little pothole he could smooth over with his love and analytical bearing.

“There you go, sugar cane,” he said, kissing the giant dimple. “So what we’ve learned today is that your psychiatrist—probably second-rate, anyway; I mean, no offense, but what kind of shrink practices in Ohio?—yes, we’ve learned today that your shrink was completely wrong about everything. The panic attacks did not bottle your anger, did not prevent you from acting irrationally, else how to explain their sudden disappearance here in Prava? Perhaps, if I may infer, what you needed was some fresh air, so to speak, some time away from the family hearth, the alma mater, and—would it be too presumptuous to suggest?—a new love affair? Am I right? Eh? Am I? Of course, I’m right.”

He shook all over with the manic feeling of being right. He threw his hands up in the air, hallelujah-style. “Well, thank God for that!” he said. “Thank God! So now we will go celebrate your complete recovery at the Stolovan Wine Archive. Yes, the Blue Room, of course. No, people like us do not need reservations… What a thought! Come on!” He grabbed her arm and started dragging her down Repin Hill where Jan was waiting with the car.

She seemed reluctant at first, as if the transition from amateur psychology to a night getting horribly drunk at the Wine Archive was somehow inappropriate. But Vladimir could think of nothing he wanted to do more. A drink or two! Enough of this talking. Panic attacks. Lashing out. The mind was sovereign. Faced with the most horrible circumstances, it could say: No! I’m in charge here! And what were the horrible circumstances in Morgan’s case? A young woman’s unease at the prospect of graduating from university? A mother’s loneliness for her daughter? A father who wanted the best for his boys? Ach, Americans were too keen to invent their own troubles. To paraphrase an old Russian expression, they were wild with their own fat.

Yes, it was rather disgusting. All through the ride to the Wine Archive, Vladimir was developing a distinct sense of anger toward Morgan. How could she do this to him? He remembered the tent in the forest as if it had happened half a century ago. Normalcy. Arousal. Affection. That was her implicit promise to him. And now this unsettling talk, and now she wasn’t letting Vladimir move into her apartment. Well, screw her. Normalcy was on its way. The familiar plush, almost pneumatic banquettes of the Wine Archive would soon be sighing meaningfully under his ass. Grant Green would be strumming along on the stereo. A bottle of port would be brought over by some ponytailed Stolovan. Vladimir would give Morgan a nice brief lecture on how much he loved her. They would go home and sleep together, drunk impotent sex having a charm all its own. It was settled.

But Morgan wasn’t through with him yet.

28. AMBUSH AT BIG TOE

THE STOLOVAN WINE archive was found right by the Foot, in the shadows of the so-called Big Toe. The Toe was the site of daily protests by angry babushkas brandishing portraits of Stalin and jerry cans of gasoline, threatening to immolate themselves on the spot if anyone ever tried to knock down the Foot or cancel their beloved Mexican soap opera, The Rich Also Cry.

Nu, as far as Vladimir was concerned, the country’s senior citizens needed to keep busy, and their discipline and dedication were kind of cute. The self-proclaimed Guardians of the Foot were divided into several divisions. The feistiest grandmas were out in front, waving their high-concept placards (“Zionism = Onanism = AIDS”) at the patrons of the Stolovan Wine Archive and the local Hugo Boss outlet, the two institutions that ironically thrived astride the Big Toe. Looking at the babushkas’ jowly red faces and subtracting some slack and residual anger, one could almost see them as brownnosing young pioneers back in the forties, plying their teachers with potato dumplings and copies of working-class president Jan Zhopka’s love poems, Comrade Jan Looks at the Moon. Oh, where did the years go, ladies? How did it come to this?

Behind these chanting grandmas, a lesser cadre was assigned the task of caring for the dachshunds of the agitators, and these grannies also performed admirably, spoiling the tiny agit-pups with bottled spring water and bowls of the choicest innards. Finally, in the third and last rank, the artistic babushkas were building a giant papier-mâché doll of Margaret Thatcher, which they burned voraciously each Sunday while howling the former Stolovan national anthem, “Our Locomotive Hurtles Forward, Forward into the Future.”

NEEDLESS TO SAY, alighting from a chauffeured BMW in front of the Wine Archive was guaranteed to drive these old folks out of their thick, wooly minds, but then Vladimir always enjoyed getting them a little riled up before ascending the stairs to the Blue Room to slurp down oysters and muscadet.

They had made their way through the Old Town in silence, Morgan still playing with her jacket’s zipper, rearranging her legs this way and that, rubbing her haunches against the car’s sleek Montana leather. Perhaps she was thinking about what she had said up on Repin Hill, all that nonsense about her panic-stricken university days; perhaps she was finally accepting just how much worse Vladimir’s life had been than hers. He could certainly tell her some stories; that could be an interesting dinner topic right there. Should he start her off with the Wonders of Soviet Kindergarten or go straight to his Floridian adventures with Jordi? “Triumph over adversity,” he would conclude. “That’s the story of Vladimir Girshkin, or else he wouldn’t be here wiping chutney mayo off that button nose of yours…”

BUT THAT CONVERSATION wasn’t to be. Here’s what happened instead.

Immediately upon their pulling up to the Archive, the car was surrounded by grandmas screaming for blood. The babushkas were livelier than usual today, stirred up by the recent change in weather, the need to keep warm through agitation. Vladimir could make out a few of their chants, including that old chestnut “Death to the poststructuralists!” and the crowd-pleasing “Epicures, go home!” It was remarkable how so many cumbersome words had found a ready home in the mouths of peasants, how communist slogans sounded perfectly similar in any Slavic language.

Morgan opened her door. There was a moment of relative calm as she made her way out of the auto, a moment Vladimir used to note that Morgan—despite all her absurd talk of panic attacks and lashing out—was really just a quiet, steady woman in cheap dress shoes. This realization made Vladimir feel soft-hearted and protective. He was reminded of the Ohio driver’s license he had found in her wallet. Portrait of a high-school girl with a Big Dipper of acne arching across the nose, a teenager’s gloomy hue, shoulders hunched over to conceal the embarrassing contents of a baggy suburban sweatshirt. He felt a new font of tenderness opening up for her. “Let’s go home, Morgan,” he wanted to say. “You look so tired. Let’s get you some sleep. Let’s forget all this.”

It was too late.

Just as Vladimir slammed the car door behind them, one of the grandmas, the tallest of the Foot Guardians, a long, canine face, a tuft of chin hair, a red medal the size of a discus around her neck, shouldered her way past her colleagues, cleared her throat, and spit the warm results at Morgan, the sizeable spew floating right past her shoulder to land on the Beamer’s tinted window.

A gasp of amazement. A German auto worth two million crowns had been so cleverly defaced! The counterrevolution had begun in earnest! History, that slut, was finally on their side. The Guardians of the Foot stood up on their toes, the hero-invalids leaning forward on their crutches. “Speak, Baba Véra!” the crowd encouraged the spitter. “Speak, lamb of Lenin!”

The Red Lamb spoke. She said but one word. An entirely unexpected, uncalled-for, and decidedly uncommunist word. “Morgan,” Baba Véra said, the English name coming off her tongue rather naturally, both syllables intact. More. Gahn.

“Morgan na gulag!” another old woman shouted.

“Morgan na gulag! Morgan na gulag!” the rest of the grannies picked up the war cry. They were jumping now like youngsters on a May Day float—oh, happy days!—spitting freely at the car, tearing at their sparse hair, waving around their spiffy woolen caps, all except for one sad-eyed, bedraggled babushka who was quietly trying to sell Vladimir a sweater.

What the hell was this? What were they saying? Morgan to the Gulag? It couldn’t be. There must have been a terrible misunderstanding. “Comrade Pensioners!” Vladimir started to say in Russian. “On behalf of the fraternal Soviet people…”

Morgan pushed him back.

“Stay out of this,” she said.

“Sugar cane,” Vladimir mumbled. He had never seen her like this. Those dead gray eyes!

“This isn’t about you,” she said.

Everything was about him. He was the king of Prava, and she was, by extension, its denim-clad queen. “I think,” Vladimir said, “I think we should go home and rent—”

But there would be no Kurosawa tonight. In a flash of bared teeth, Morgan had turned on her tormentors. It all happened so fast. The tongue was pressed firmly against the upper palate… The letter R was thoroughly trilled… There followed several frothy explosions in the guise of Č, Š, and Ž…

The grandmothers pulled back in horror.

It was as if some devil, some kind of Slavic devil with a horrible American accent, was speaking through Morgan. “Shaker Heights,” Vladimir whispered, trying to console himself with geography. South Woodland Boulevard.

But he was thinking of someone else, another Morgan, because in place of that warm, nature-loving creature, a far-fetched, worldly one was now shouting at the grandmothers in remarkably fluent Stolovan, dropping the word “polemical” as easily as the real Morgan drove tent stakes into the topsoil.

“Š mertí k nogù!” the sham Morgan was hollering, her face twisted into unlikely anger, a white-knuckled fist raised in solidarity with some mysterious non-Ohioan life-force. Death to the Foot!

“Eh,” Vladimir said, instinctively making his way back to the car.

Meanwhile, Baba Véra, all bad teeth and vitriol, her red Medal of Socialist Labor flapping in the wind, had come snout-to-snout with Morgan and was conveying any number of sentiments Vladimir could not quite make out. The name Tomaš kept coming up and Vladimir assumed blyat’ meant “whore” in Stolovan as well as in his native tongue.

“Morgan!” Vladimir shouted in exasperation. He was on the verge of asking Jan to start up the Beamer and spirit him away to the Joy or the Repré, someplace full of velvety throw cushions and fuzzy expats, someplace where the entropy factor was nil and everything was primed to go Vladimir’s way.

Because, to be honest, he could no longer abide this impostor who spoke an obscure Eastern European language, who dueled communist grannies to the death over a hundred-meter galosh, who maintained (sexual?) relations with some mysterious Tomaš, who kept a sealed, secret room in her panelak apartment, and whose life clearly extended beyond dating Vladimir and teaching English to hotel clerks.

“Morgan!” he cried once more, this time without any conviction.

And then, just as Morgan was turning to face her befuddled Vladimir, Baba Véra ambled up and pushed her with one gnarled paw.

Morgan stumbled back a little, there was a moment when her balance seemed lost, but in the end those strong twenty-three-year-old legs kept her aloft. The next thing Vladimir realized was that Jan had somehow made his way between Morgan and the old woman. There was the sound of hard against soft. A shriek. Vladimir’s eyes did not react as quickly as his ears. It took him some time to register the situation on the ground.

Baba Véra was on her knees.

There was a collective rumble of disbelief.

A shiny black object.

Baba Véra touched her forehead. There was no blood. Just a circle of red, a smaller version of the medal cradled between her breasts.

The Guardians of the Foot were wordlessly backing away from their fallen comrade. The wiener-dogs were yapping their tiny lungs out.

Jan lifted up the shiny black object in his hand as if to strike her again, but Baba Véra was too dazed to even flinch. “Jan!” Vladimir said. He could only think of his own grandmother tying a red handkerchief around his neck, feeding him a prized Cuban banana for breakfast. “Jan, no!”

Jan had hit her with his radar detector.

IN THE NEXT minute or so, the earth continued to revolve around the sun. Jan continued to tower over the toppled grandmother. Baba Véra continued to kneel before him. Vladimir continued to retreat to the safety of the BMW, although his car was now lost in a different, non-Bavarian dimension. And Morgan… Morgan was standing there, chin up, fists curled, nursing her vast and incomprehensible grudge, momentarily silent but ready for more.

They were all bound up now in a single gesture.

A FEW MINUTES later Vladimir was dismally eating his oysters, Morgan helping herself to a large pitcher of lukewarm sangria. Vladimir’s personal table was located beneath the Blue Room’s skylight, so that when he looked up he could see a billowy coal cloud settling over the Foot like a flared trouser. It was uncanny: The damned Foot was determined to follow him wherever he went. He felt like one of those blighted rural folk who keep imagining black U.N. helicopters chasing them during their interminable possum hunts.

The maître d’, a slick, modern man of Vladimir’s age, kept coming by the table to apologize to Morgan and Vladimir “on behalf of all the young Stolovans.” It was he who had ended the showdown at Big Toe, sprinting out of the Wine Archive with a knotted rope and quickly lashing the grandmas into a panicked retreat. “Ah, the old… The old are our misfortune,” he said, shaking his head, pausing to check the mobile phone holstered to his belt. “Dear grandmothers! It is not enough that they stole our childhood. Not enough for them… Only the whip they understand.”

Soon a complimentary roast boar was placed between Vladimir and Morgan, but the disturbed Vladimir spent the entrée portion of the meal picking at his laminated teeth, leaving the little pig-carcass to slowly suffocate in juniper oil and truffle foam. He was trying to modulate his anger, guide it toward the realm of sadness, wondering how much of an outburst he could get away with within the dignified sanctum of the Blue Room.

Only by dessert time, when their deep silence had become more uncomfortable, did Vladimir open his mouth, did he ask her what it meant: Morgan to the Gulag?

She spoke without looking at him. She spoke in a begrudging tone not terribly different from the tone she employed with the Guardians of the Foot. She spoke in the guise of the Other Morgan, the Morgan who evidently found Vladimir untrustworthy, unsympathetic, or, worse yet, positively irrelevant. Here is what she told Vladimir: She told him that she had a Stolovan friend, his parents jailed under the old regime, his grandparents executed in the early fifties. Once her good friend had taken her to the Foot, and they had a terrible fight with the grandmothers. The babushkas had been itching to purge her ever since.

Was her friend named Tomaš, perchance?

She answered his question with more questions: Was Vladimir implying she could not have friends of her own? Did she need his approval now? Or was she obliged to spend all her time listening to Cohen and Plank whine about their fat little lives?

Vladimir opened his mouth. She was right, of course, but nonetheless he found himself oddly protective of the Crowd. At least a soft and rudderless fellow like Cohen was not capable of betrayal. Cohen was Cohen and nothing more. He had mastered the American art of being entirely himself. And speaking of betrayal, where did she learn such flawless Stolovan?

She allowed herself a tiny victorious smile and informed him that she had taken many classes in Stolovan at that polyglot Ohio university of hers. Was Vladimir surprised that she could master a foreign language? Did he have a monopoly on being foreign? Did he think her an idiot?

Vladimir shuddered. No, no. It was nothing like that. He was just asking…

But what Vladimir was doing was this: He was losing her. He was groveling for her reassurance in a scorned lover’s voice. The familiar aphorism “in love there is always someone kissing and someone being kissed” came to mind.

Yes, he imagined it was all over. It was time to forget the holy trinity of Arousal, Affection, and Normalcy, to forget their little sojourn in the tent, the way she had brushed the thistles off his person, unzipped his janitor pants, hoisted him atop of her, pushed him forward. To forget the way she had handled his weaknesses, with kindness and complicity both.

Instead, he was left now to mull over a new word, a word that practically annulled the past three months with this woman. The word was “distance,” and as he stirred his espresso and poked at his pear strudel, he was thinking of ways to use it in a sentence. I’m becoming increasingly aware of a distance… No, that wouldn’t do.

There’s a distance between us, Morgan.

Yes, there certainly was. But even that was an understatement.

And finally it came to him. The words he couldn’t say.

Who are you, Morgan Jenson? Because I think I’ve made a mistake.

Yes. Right. Once again. On a different continent, but with the same blind, stupid vigor, with the same debilitating faith of the Jew-walking beta immigrant.

A mistake.

29. THE NIGHT OF MEN

BEFORE THINGS GOT better, they had to get worse. The day after the debacle with the Foot, it was time for an evening of pain and uncertainty, the long-awaited Night of Men—Plank, Cohen, and Vladimir out on the town with their Y chromosomes, facial stubble, and early 90s white-male ennui in tow. Looking for beer.

In truth, Vladimir was not averse to this manly endeavor. After the previous night of kissing and not being kissed, he wanted, once more, to embrace whatever embraced him back, and at this point the Crowd was it; the last bastion of no surprises. That morning, however, there had been a sign of hope on the Morgan front. After flossing and gargling for work, she had come over to Vladimir (he was sitting glumly in the bathtub sprinkling his chest with soapy water) and kissed his tiny bald spot, whispering “Sorry about last night,” and helping him rub his daily dose of minoxidil into the bare bull’s-eye of his crown. Vladimir, shocked by her unexpected affection, squeezed her thigh a little, even pulled, in a desultory way, a clump of pubic hair peeking out of her robe, but said not a word in response. It wasn’t time for that yet. Sorry, indeed.

AS FOR THE night of men, the chosen venue, a bar, was Jan’s suggestion and a good one. As Stolovan as the New, Improved & Euro-Ready Prava could get in those days, with tables of thin, pimpled conscripts and off-duty police officers accounting for most of the patronage. All were still in uniform, swilling good beer poured from a row of spouting taps, which had been so well trained in the art of dispensation that even in the “off” position they continued to gush. There was no decor, only walls, a roof, and a minimal outdoor garden where folding chairs were scattered about, creaking under the weight of the military and security organs that occupied them. A plastic statue of a pink flamingo brought back by “the first modern Stolovan to visit Florida,” according to the barmaid, stood watch on one leg over the clinking of mugs, and the cheerful trading of insults.

Cohen and Plank at first seemed uneasy about the local scene. Vladimir could see them clutching their American Express cards inside their trouser pockets as if they feared being eaten alive by the natives after failing to cover the tab. An understandable fear, as the soldiers looked hungry and the kitchen was closed. But as the tab built, the boys let their shoulders stoop and took their unused hand—the one not handling the mug—out of their pockets, setting it on the bar next to the beer where it tapped along to Michael Jackson’s entire oeuvre as it unfolded from the sound system. He still sounded good after all those years, that strange bird.

On their own they didn’t get past some perfunctory grunts, and “Boy, this beer is good,” but then the conscripts next to them, a Jan and a Voichek, started passing around German pornography and practicing their English. Quickly the nude women got to Cohen and Plank; they sighed in unison each time a page was turned by the leering Jan or his giggling, younger companion. “She looks just like Alexandra,” they said, and then tried to explain to the conscripts in a combination of English, Stolovan, and Masculinity, that they knew a woman just as gorgeous and desirable as the one on display. Jan and Voichek were greatly impressed.

“Like this?” they said, pointing at breasts and labias and then looking back awed at the Americans who, at least in the female company they kept, still seemed the citizens of a great world power.

What amazed Vladimir, who contributed little to the conversation beyond some simulated slobber, was that the German Valkyries in the magazine did not resemble Alexandra in the slightest. The models were blond and impossibly tall, with legs spread out like pincers to expose the uniformly hairless run of pink held open by several fingers. Alexandra, while not short or heavy, was hardly towering, or blond, or paper-thin. Her Portuguese fore-mothers had bequeathed her a healthy Mediterranean fullness of hips, lips, and breasts. The only criteria satisfied by both her and the women in the magazine was that they were all desirable.

For Plank and Cohen that was enough. Anything would have been enough to get them hot and upset. Soon the particulars of Plank’s and Cohen’s malaise dawned on the conscripts and they excused themselves claiming they had to go pick up their girlfriends “for the prophylactic work.”

“Okay, gents,” Vladimir said, when standard English had returned to their corner of the bar. “Another round, what do you say?”

Grunts of approval as enthusiastic as the lowing of cows.

“All right,” Vladimir said. “Look, I have a thing for Alexandra too.”

Happy amazement. Him too! A universal dilemma! “But what about Morgan?” Plank asked, scratching at his enormous shaved head.

Vladimir shrugged. What about Morgan? Could he unbosom himself to the boys? No, it was out of the question. They were too fragile and set in their ways. The news of Morgan’s double life could easily give each a stroke.

“It is possible to love two women,” Vladimir declared in answer to Plank’s question. “Especially when you only sleep with one of them.”

“Yes, I believe that’s right,” said the scholarly Cohen, as if these laws were codified and available for perusal at the Rimbaud Institute of Desire. “Although sooner or later things start to fall apart.”

Vladimir ignored that, pressing on like a concerned den mother: “What you boys need is to chase after someone else. And I mean really chase and not just wait and mope.” There was laughter. “I’m serious. Look at the position you find yourself in: You’re on top of the world here. You’re more respected than you’ll ever be…”

He hadn’t meant it quite so truthfully. “You’re more respected in the context of being young and not yet aware of the full range of your artistic proclivities,” he clarified, although it was not necessary. They knew they were great. “You can have just about anyone you want in this town!” he shouted.

“Just about,” Cohen said, sadly chewing on his beer.

“I hear you, brother,” Plank mumbled to Cohen.

The boys tried to smile and shrug good-naturedly, as senior citizens from the Old World are bound to do when informed that their daily meal of fondue and blood sausages can have repercussions.

Vladimir, for one, was prepared to spend the whole evening hammering in his message and draining the prodigious taps. Unbeknownst to him, however, there were rumors, broadcast to the whole neighborhood by patrons staggering home, of a group of strangely dressed American dandies loitering in the local watering hole, and these rumors soon yielded a visitor.

HE WAS A rather striking Stolovan—tall and built, it would seem, from the same millennial bricks that had gone into the Emanuel Bridge. The hair was cropped short and adorned with a cowlick, as was the emerging fashion in Western capitals; and the clothes, a gray turtleneck and a vest of black corduroy, were also close to the latest style. Not to mention that he was in his early forties and men of that age group could be given some leeway as far as their wardrobes were concerned; that is to say, points could be given for effort alone.

“Hello, dear guests,” he said in an accent so slight it approximated Vladimir’s. “Your glasses are almost empty. Permit me!” He shouted orders to the barmaid. The glasses were filled.

“My name is František,” he said, “and I am a longtime citizen of this city and this neighborhood. Now allow me to guess where you’re from. I have a natural gift for geography. Detroit?”

He was not completely wrong. Plank, as has been established before, was indeed from a suburb of the Motor City. “But what about me says Detroit?” the dog-breeder wanted to know with outright indignation.

“I notice your height, lankiness, and complexion,” František said, unhurriedly sipping his beer. “I deduce from these attributes that your ancestry is of this part of the world. Not exactly Stolovan, but are you, by chance, Moravian?”

“Partly, I believe,” Plank said. “I like to think of myself as more of a Bohemian.”

This joke went unappreciated. František continued: “So I think of parts of the States with big concentrations of Eastern Europeans and immediately I think of big Midwestern cities, but, for some reason, not Chicago when I look at you. So… Detroit.”

“Very good,” Vladimir said, already trying to draw a map of their new acquaintance’s social complexion to better account for his remarkable sagacity. “But, in my case, as you can plainly see,” Vladimir said, “my ancestry is not of this part of the world, and hence, it is unlikely that I am from Detroit.”

“Yes, perhaps you are not from Detroit,” František said, keeping his good form. “But, unless I am a complete fool, which is surely possible, I do believe that your ancestry is from this part of the world, because you look to me a Jew!”

Cohen bristled at the use of the last word, but František continued: “And furthermore, your accent says to me that it was you and not your ancestors that left this part of the world or, to be more precise, Russia or the Ukraine, for sadly we don’t have any Jews left here except in the cemeteries where they’re stacked ten to a grave. So, then, New York is where you resettled, and your father’s either a doctor or an engineer; and by the looks of your goatee and long hair you are an artist or, more likely, a writer; and your parents are aghast, because they do not consider it a profession; and university is so expensive in the States, but still it is doubtful they would have settled for anything but the most expensive college, since you are likely the only child; obviously so, since most cosmopolitan Muscovites or Petersburgers (is that where you’re from?) have one child, at most, two, in an effort to concentrate meager resources.”

“You are a professor,” said Vladimir, “or else a traveler and voracious reader of periodicals.” He was not surprised to find himself easily replicating the voice and tone of the Stolovan. He was that infectious.

“Well,” said František. “I am not a professor. No.”

“Fine then,” said Cohen, seemingly satisfied that the man was not an anti-Semite. “I’ll get the next beers if you entertain us with the story of your life.”

“You get the beers and I will buy shots of vodka,” recommended František. “They complement each other perfectly. You will see.”

So it was done this way, and while the vodka did not go down smoothly at first, the gentle American palate soon adapted, or rather, was bypassed, as inebriation set in. Meanwhile, the Stolovan gentleman related his story with great cheer—it was obvious he relished the opportunity to tell it to young, devil-may-care Americans; older Americans, particularly those not schooled in modern irony, might have been less amused.

As a youth, the handsome František studied at the faculty of linguistics and was a star pupil, as could be expected. This was almost half a decade after the Soviet invasion of 1969, when so-called normalization had set in nicely and Brezhnev was still waving at tractors from atop the mausoleum.

František’s father was big at the Interior Ministry, the kind of chipper place where faceless and hairless bureaucrats sent helicopters to hover meters over the open graves of dissidents during their funerals. František’s father was particularly fond of that maneuver. His son, however, had picked up some sense of moral disquietude here or there, most likely at the university, where such things generally lurk. But it was a quiet sense of disquietude, in that while František refused a fast-track career at the Interior Ministry, he nonetheless could not bring himself to sneak around with samizdat pamphlets, attend clandestine meetings in sulfur-smelling basements, or to be reduced to a job as, say, an attendant at a municipal water-closet—the basics of dissident activity.

Instead, he got himself a job as assistant deputy editor of the regime’s favorite newspaper, the appropriately named Red Justice. There were quite a few assistant deputies, but no matter. František with his talent, towering good looks, and a father in the Interior Ministry soon wangled for himself the enviable position of covering “culture,” which meant traveling abroad on the heels of the Stolovan Philharmonic, the opera, the ballet, and any art exhibits that made it out of Mayakovsky Airport.

Abroad! “My life revolved around the export calendars of Prava’s better institutions,” František said, turning to stare wistfully in the direction of what used to be the free world, or so one would imagine. “And sometimes even the provinces coughed up something worth sending to London, although [sigh] more often to Moscow or, God forbid, Bucharest.”

František loved the West like the mistress one gets to see only after her mindful husband gets sent to balance the books in the Milwaukee office. He loved Paris especially, a not-uncommon love affair for Stolovans, whose early-twentieth-century artists had consistently looked to Gaul for inspiration. Once free of the silly commitments at the local embassy and the actual performances, he would roam freely without particular destination in mind, exchanging taxis for the metro, aimless rambles along the Seine for getting totaled in the Montparnasse, all while avoiding the significant Stolovan expatriate community that would likely roast him up along with their carp and dumplings.

But with actual Westerners he was a big success. After the Soviet invasion there was no shortage of sympathy for “a young, oppressed Stolovan, let out for just a glimpse of freedom, only to be corralled back into his Stalinist pen.” And when the lithe French women begged, and indignant British chaps demanded that he defect, he would wipe his tears and tell them about his mama and papa, the hard-pressed, sooted chimney cleaners, who would surely spend their remaining years in the gulag if he missed his two o’clock flight.

“If you read writers like Hrabal or Kundera,” František said, while toasting wordlessly in conjunction with a newly arrived round of Polish Wybornaya, “you will see that sex is not unimportant for the East European man.” And then he went into some of this sex that took place in Hempstead Tudors and TriBeCa lofts; and just looking at this healthy, wide-faced buck one could picture him, without too many acrobatics of the imagination, with almost any woman and in nearly any position, but always sporting the same enthralled and determined expression, his body properly soaked and bruised.

Here Plank and Cohen descended into reverie, staring happily into the depths of their shot glasses as František enumerated his assignations. Vladimir was pleased that they took all this in with a sense of healthy wonderment. Perhaps they weren’t imposing the Alexandra template—the way they had done with the ludicrous German pornography—on Cherice the political activist and Marta the performance artist who had both shared a room in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district only to share František during the world tour of the Prava Children’s Puppet Theater. Who knew what accounted for their budding interest: perhaps Vladimir’s earlier pep talk, or the beer mixed with vodka, or the charm of the former apparatchik gushing over his international delights with, still, a sense of boundless possibility?

But, of course, the cultural beat wasn’t all Dutch tulips and Godiva. There was also the domestic front, and they watched František take an extended swill of beer in preparation for this portion. “Oh, how they would come,” he said. “From every region of every district of every goddamn Slavic country… ‘Citizens, now we are pleased to present the Stavropol Krai Peasant Chorus!’ All the bloody peasant choruses! All those fucking balalaikas! And always singing about some Katyusha picking boysenberries on the river bank and then the local boys spot her and make her blush. I mean, really! Try writing a review of that minus the cynicism. ‘At the Palace of Culture last night, our socialist brethren from Minsk demonstrated once again the progressive peasant culture that has kept local ethnographers enthralled since the heady days of the Revolution.’”

He reached into his shot glass and sprinkled some vodka in his face. “What can I tell you,” he said, squinting. “That was the hell of it, but then it all fell apart anyway…”

“No more Red Justice?” Vladimir asked.

“Oh, no, it’s still there,” František said. “Some of the older people still read it. The ones on a fixed income who can’t afford sausages and are getting really pissed on that score, the so-called Guardians of the Foot, you might have heard them wailing by the Big Toe. Yes, they pay me to write something now and then. Or I give a speech on the cultural-glory days of Brezhnev and our first working-class president Jan Zhopka for the geezers at the Great Hall of People’s Friendship. You know, that huge place with the old socialist flag hanging out the window like somebody’s dirty laundry.”

“Where is that again?” Vladimir asked. “It sounds familiar.”

“It’s on the embankment facing the castle, right by the most expensive restaurant in Prava.”

“Yes, I’ve been to that restaurant,” Vladimir said, coloring at the thought of his Cole Porter revue with the Groundhog.

“But it’s not fair,” Plank said. “You’re so bright and well-traveled. You should write for one of the new papers.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. After our most recent revolution they published a lengthy directory of who did what during the lost years, and it would seem that my family has a whole chapter devoted to it.”

“Maybe you could write for the Prava-dence,” suggested Cohen.

“Oh, but it’s such crap,” František said. (Thankfully Cohen was too pickled to take umbrage.)

“What I really want to do is open a nightclub,” he said.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” cried Plank. “Sometimes the night life here really rubs me the wrong way.” He stopped. “Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t feel good.”

They let him pass by without much concern. “Yes,” František said. “Your weak-stomached friend is right. Right now there’s only ABBA here. ABBA and some very poor attempts at modernity. When I was…” Again he looked wistfully in some unspecified direction, perhaps this time of the airport. “When I was traveling around, you know, I always got taken to the latest discos with the most attractive men and women, such as yourselves, of course. Now my mouth waters for a good, what is it now?…”

“Rave,” Cohen said helpfully.

“A good rave. Ah, I even know a terrific Finnish disk jockey. MC Paavo. Have you heard of him? No? He’s successful in Helsinki, but not very happy there. Too clean, he says, although I don’t know, I’ve never been.”

“He should come here!” Cohen said, smashing his shot glass against the bar. Vladimir quickly dropped a hundred-crown note for the damage.

“I think he’d like to, but he needs a sure thing, a contract. He’s got the needy former wives and then also the little MCs running around in the Laplands. The Finns are very familial, which is why perhaps they enjoy the world’s highest rate of suicide.” He chuckled and signaled for another round, pointing to Plank’s empty stool and shaking his finger as if to say, “minus one.”

“Well, did you know that Vladimir is the vice president of PravaInvest?”

“Um,” Vladimir said.

“There’s actually something called PravaInvest?” The Stolovan contained his mischievous smile, but clearly with effort and a lot of blinking. “Do post me a prospectus immediately, gentlemen.”

“Oh yes!” Cohen said, oblivious to the apparatchik’s sarcastic tone. “PravaInvest is gargantuan. I understand it’s capitalized with over 35 billion dollars.”

František looked at Vladimir long and straight as if to say, “One of those, eh?”

“Um,” Vladimir said again. “It’s no big deal, really.”

“Well, don’t you see?” Cohen was exasperated. “He’ll fund your nightclub! Just bring over the Finn and we’re set.”

Vladimir sighed at the rashness of his young associate. “Of course, nothing’s that easy,” he said. “In the real world there are impediments. The skyrocketing price of real estate in central Prava, for example.”

“That I wouldn’t count as a problem,” František said. “See, if you opened it up in the town center you would get basically the rich German tourists. But if you operate on the city outskirts and at the same time you’re convenient to public transportation or a short taxi ride from the center, then you get a more exclusive, sophisticated clientele. I mean, how many truly trendy clubs are there on the Champs-Élysées? Or on Fifth Avenue in Midtown? It’s just not done.”

“He’s right! He’s right!” said the irrepressible Cohen. “Why don’t you just invest in this thing, hmm? Come on, do us all a favor. You know there’s no fun left at the Nouveau or the Joy on a Saturday with all those fucking papa’s girls and mama’s boys and that shit they play… That shit! How can they play that shit and still charge you fifteen crowns for admission?”

“That’s fifty cents,” Vladimir reminded him.

“Well, be that as it may,” Cohen said, now talking almost exclusively to František, the way a child turns to one parent after being refused by the other, “but that’s still no reason not to start this thing, especially with MC Pavel on board.”

Vladimir lifted his beer up to his twitching face. “Yes, but you see, Mr. František, PravaInvest is a very concerned, socially aware multinational. Its philosophy is to concentrate on essential needs based on a country’s conditions on the ground, in a Cartesian sense, of course, at what we call ‘point of entry.’ And, believe me, this country needs a good locally produced fax modem more than it needs another dance club or casino.”

“I don’t know about that,” František said. “Maybe not casinos, which are, on the whole, quite desperate places, but a nice, new dance club could be, how is it they say in America… A ‘morale booster’?”

Perhaps it was František’s accent returning after so much alcohol, the way Vladimir’s was prone to do, but when their new Stolovan friend said “casino,” Vladimir could picture it only with a K, which led him naturally to the Kasino in his panelak, and, by extension, to the friendly Russian women who entertained there, and by the furthest of extensions, to the tremendous waste of potential space therein. A nightclub.

He accepted yet another shot from the barmaid who, in the poor light and the long-settled darkness, wore an expression that couldn’t be gauged; it could only be surmised that she spoke with expressiveness about something. “This round is free,” František translated, smiling with pride at the generosity of his countrywoman.

“Morale booster,” Vladimir said after the vodka had gone down and burned his insides with the compressed fury of the thousand Polish potato fields that had been depotatoed to produce this vintage. “So how good is this MC Paavo when compared to what they have in London and New York?”

“He’s better than Tokyo,” František said with the surety of a connoisseur and tipped his bar stool toward Vladimir so that their eyes, red and moist from the festivities, were as close as etiquette allowed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Conditions-on-the-Ground,” he said. “And I know about your little business with Harry Green. Perhaps we should meet and discuss further possibilities.”

Meanwhile, the stereo was running out of Michael Jackson. Outside, in the frigid air and by the light of the moon, the soldiers were singing some sort of a local song with an oom-pah-pah beat that clearly could have benefited from the deployment of an actual band. Plank could be heard producing unsettling sounds in the bathroom. “Ah,” František said, moving away from Vladimir slightly, as he knew that Westerners did not like to share breath. “Speaking of peasant choruses, there’s one. It’s about a little mare who is very upset at her master because he sent her to the smith to get cobbled. And now she refuses to give him a kiss.”

Cohen nodded to Vladimir, his eyes narrow with understanding, as if there was a lesson in there for everyone. They heard Plank struggling with the lock of the bathroom and cursing himself, but they sat drunk and motionless, until the barmaid came to his rescue.

30. A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

HOW IT HAPPENED that they missesd Jan and the car was for Vladimir a bitter lesson in the downside of alcoholism. Apparently he and Cohen had stumbled into the beer garden and there took the wrong pathway out; that is, instead of walking into Jan and the car they walked into a silent, charcoal-stained street whose silence was broken by the jangle of a tram bell and the screech of rails. “Ah!” they cried, mistaking the passing tram for some kind of heavenly sign, and they staggered after it, waving their arms as if they were bidding adieu to an ocean liner. Soon enough, the yellow-lighted warmth drew closer, and they climbed aboard on all fours, shouting “Dobry den’!” to the dusty factory workers snoozing in the back.

It was only after they had gone several neighborhoods down toward somewhere or other that Vladimir remembered Jan and the BMW. “Oh,” he said, butting Cohen in the side, in response to which Cohen took out a sparkling bottle of vodka. This was a gift František had given them along with his phone and fax numbers before he departed the beer garden, dragging the incapacitated Plank along to a nearby pad for a refresher course in sobriety. Vladimir had been unsure about the last part. He held a tainted view of visiting older men and their sleeping quarters, especially when the whole scene had been stirred with alcohol. But what to do?

“Ve drink,” Cohen said, failing at a Russian accent.

“We’re drunk,” Vladimir said, uncapping the bottle nonetheless. “Where are we?” he said, pressing his nose to the cool window pane, watching the drooping lindens, the small apartment houses peeking out from behind manicured hedges. “What the hell are we doing here?”

They turned to look at one another. It was a serious question at three in the morning and they tussled for the bottle in exasperation, a struggle which, for the sake of clarification, was not conducted with the energy of, say, two farm boys just coming into their pubescent strength.

The tram had crossed the river and had started mountain-climbing. They had barely reached the middle plateau of Repin Hill, where the Austrians were building a family entertainment complex around a cartoon character named Günter Goose, when the tram suddenly shuddered to a halt.

Outside the tram window, two heads bobbed in the night, their scalps as white as the moon, the few randomly sprouting hairs passable for the outlines of craters and other such lunar geography. Two skinheads, their relative height and size forming approximately the ratio between Abbott and Costello, got on board, their many chains jangling against their belt buckles, which were replicas of Confederate flags. They were laughing and pretending to punch each other, managing in the interim of their playfulness to swig from bottles of Becherovka liquor, so that Vladimir first assumed they were Stolovan gays who had mistaken the Confederate flag for just another symbol of Americana. After all, the bald look had long become de rigueur on Christopher Street.

But when they saw Vladimir and then turned to Cohen, the laughter stopped. Two pairs of fists appeared, and in the overabundant light of the tram their naked scalps, acne, battle scars, and twitching sneers formed a distinct roadmap of adolescent hatred.

There was a crash against the window to Vladimir’s right and immediately there was alcohol in his eyes, shards of glass stinging against his skin like so many little shaving accidents, and the unmistakable smell of the pumpkin liquor; the short, fat one must have thrown his bottle. Vladimir couldn’t open his eyes. When he tried, there was only the muddled indistinction of eyedrops just applied and, anyway, he really didn’t want to see. In the darkness, an amorphous series of thoughts were coalescing around the concepts of pain, injustice, and revenge but what it all came down to was the therapeutic qualities of his grandmother’s coarse, old Russian pillow—hard, but yielding—on which he had first practiced his amorous ways. That was the thought of the moment. With the instinctual, life-affirming panic submerged in vodka and Unesko beer, only the sadness concerning the impending loss of life and limb—this sadness that should have emerged only as an afterthought—rose to the surface. It had to have been so, because Vladimir said only one word in response to the bottle attack. “Morgan,” he said, and he said it too quietly for anyone to hear. He could see her, for some reason, carrying her fugitive cat across the courtyard, cradling the rebellious animal like a mother all too ready to forgive.

“Auslander raus!” screamed the short one. “Raus! Raus!”

Cohen had Vladimir by the hand, his own palm cold and wet. Vladimir was dragged up to his feet and then he hit what must have been the sharp edge of a tram seat, but he tried hard not to lose his balance, for, at that moment, the reality that he was his parents’ only child, and that his mother and father could not possibly go on with him dead dawned on Vladimir. And so, finally, he panicked—an eye-opening panic that showed him quite clearly the tram steps, the still-open door, and the black asphalt beyond.

“Foreigner out!” shouted the other skinhead in English; between them they had clearly mastered the right words in the right European languages. “Back to Turk-land!”

The wind gusting off the river slammed into their backs like a concerned friend leading the way. Behind them they could hear the laughter of their assailants as well as that of the newly awakened factory workers, and the fading, patient voice of the tram recording: “Please desist entering and exiting, the doors are about to close.”

They ran broken-field past the parked Fiats and randomly lit street lamps, toward the familiar darkened hulk of the castle in the far distance. They ran without looking at one another. Several blocks later, Vladimir’s sense of panic gave out, and the sadness returned and physically manifested itself in the shape of a giant ball of mucus rising up through his stomach and lungs, past his racing heart. His feet folded beneath him, rather gracefully, and he wound up first on his knees, then on his palms, and then twisted over on his back.

VLADIMIR RECOVERED TO the sound of a great automotive roar. Two police cars beaming electric-blue and red against the valley of pink Baroque where Cohen and Vladimir had come to rest had pulled up to within inches of Vladimir’s snout, and the boys were immediately surrounded by sweaty giants. They could see the outlines of night sticks bouncing against trousers, smell the beer and pork-loin breath overpowering the street’s coal-and-diesel reek, and hear the laughter, the great rumbling free-for-all of the Slav policeman at three in the morning.

Yes, they were a merry lot, prancing atop of our fallen heroes while the strobe lights of their cars reinforced the carnivalesque atmosphere—it seemed as if a rave, the very one František had been hoping to conjure up a few hours earlier, was really underfoot.

Vladimir lay crumpled in a nest he had instinctively made out of his parka and heavy sweater. “Budu Jasem Americanko,” he halfheartedly pleaded in the only Stolovan he knew. “I am an American.”

This only contributed to the general merriment. An additional squadron of police Trabants pulled out from the converging side streets and a dozen more officers joined the ranks. In no time at all, the latecomers were chanting the expatriate mantra: “Budu Jasem Americanko! Budu Jasem Americanko!”

A few had taken off their caps and had started humming the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” picked up from years of watching the Olympics.

“American businessman,” Vladimir clarified, but even that did not raise his estimation in the eyes of the law. The policemen’s ball continued with reinforcements arriving by the minute until it appeared that every member of the municipal forces assigned to night duty was involved. Some even brought cameras and Vladimir and Cohen soon found themselves under a barrage of photo flashes; a bottle of Stoli was thrust into Cohen’s limp hands and he modeled it half-consciously while muttering all the Stolovan he had ever learned: “I’m an American… I write poetry… I like it here… Two beers, please, and we’ll split the trout…”

And then very quickly there was the screech of walkie-talkies, superiors shouting orders, and car doors being slammed. Something was happening somewhere else and the boulevard began to clear. The last to go, a young recruit in an oversized red-and-gold cap initialed with the fearsome Stolovan lion, came by to ruffle Cohen’s hair and yanked the bottle out of his arms. “Sorry, American friend,” he said. “Stoli cost money.” He also did something nice: he picked up the boys, one in each arm, and moved them off the tram rails (ah, so that had been the sharp pain in Vladimir’s back) and onto the sidewalk. “Bye, businessman,” he said to Vladimir, his sincere little mustache twitching as he spoke, then got into his Trabant and took off, siren blaring into the terminally disturbed night.

IF THE NIGHT had ended right there, that would have been one thing. But no sooner had the Politzia left and Vladimir and Cohen started breathing again than an additional convoy of automobiles appeared to take their space, this time a trail of BMWs flanked on both ends by American Jeeps.

Gusev.

He scrambled out from the flagship car, overbundled for the weather in his shiny full-length nutria coat, looking like a deposed king fleeing an onrush of peasants with guns, or like a bald disco promoter past his prime. “Disgrace!” he shouted.

Behind him were several men, all former Interior Ministry troops, dressed the part in fatigues and night goggles. It must have been that kind of night for them.

“Psh, psh,” the soldiers were saying in the background, their heads raised to the sky, as if they were too embarrassed to look down at Vladimir and Cohen, the latter with his head folded fetally into his stomach, looking like a half-rolled sleeping bag.

“We heard it!” Gusev shouted. “The talk on the radio scanner! Two Americans crawling across Ujezd Street, one of them dark-haired and hook-nosed… We knew immediately who it was!”

“Look at them… How drunk!” one of the soldiers said, shaking his head as if it was something fantastic to behold.

Vladimir, a young gentleman in many ways, and one raised to appreciate proper bearing and the importance of seeming sober, genuinely considered becoming embarrassed. His associate Cohen, in particular, cut a pretty poor figure at this point, all balled up and moaning something about “hating it, absolutely hating it.” But then for Gusev and his men to castigate Vladimir after they probably just got back from neutering some Bulgarians or the like struck Vladimir as something of an injustice. “Gusev!” he said, struggling to achieve in his voice both control and condescension. “Enough of this. Get me a taxi immediately!”

“You’re in no position to dictate orders,” Gusev said. He flicked his wrist dismissively; it would seem his advance staff had never informed him that this particular expression of absolute power had become passé about a century ago. “Get inside my car immediately, Girshkin,” he said, shaking the collars of his coat so that the indistinguishable remains of dead nutrias shimmered in the street light. It was clear that in a different world, under a different regime but with the same armed men at his disposal, Mikhail Gusev would have been a very important man.

“My American associate and I refuse!” Vladimir said in Russian. He felt a swirl in his stomach, the undulation of his daily intake of gulash, potato dumplings, and booze, and hoped to God that he wouldn’t throw up right then and there, for that would certainly mean losing the argument. “You have embarrassed me enough. My American associate and I were on our way to a late-night meeting. Who knows what he thinks of us Russians now.”

“It is you, Girshkin, who have made us into the laughingstock of Prava. And just when we have cemented our understanding with this city’s police. Oh, no, no, friend. Tonight, you ride home with me. And then we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya…”

Cohen must have sensed the malice in his voice, for despite his utter incomprehension of Russian, he made a mooing sound from within his fetal ball. “No!” Vladimir translated Cohen’s mooing into Russian for Gusev’s benefit. He was becoming all the more frightened himself. Just what was Gusev planning to do with him? “Your insubordination is noted, Gusev. If you refuse to call for a taxi, give me the mobile and I will do so myself.”

Gusev turned back to his men who were as yet unsure whether they should laugh or take this small drunkard seriously, but after Gusev gave them the nod the laughter began in earnest. Smiling solicitously, Gusev began his approach.

“Do you know what I am going to do to you, my goose?” Gusev whispered to Vladimir, although his thick Russian sibilants were loud enough for the entire block to hear. “Do you know how long it takes to solve a crime in this city when you have friends at Municipal House? Remember that leg they found in the sock bin at the Kmart? I wonder who it was we dismembered that day. Was it his excellency the Ukrainian ambassador? Or was that the day we circumcised the minister of fishing and hatcheries? Would you like me to tell you? How about I look in my log book? Better still, how about I snuff you and your little friend? Why waste a hundred words when one bullet will do between you two pederasts?”

He was close enough for Vladimir to smell the intense shoe-polish reeking off his motorcycle boots. Vladimir opened his mouth—what was he going to do? Recite Pushkin? Bite Gusev’s leg? He, Vladimir, had done something to Jordi back in the Floridian hotel room… He had…

“Opa, boys!” Gusev shouted to his men. “Can you see the article in the Stolovan Ekspress tomorrow? ‘Two Americans Die in Suicide Pact Over Rising Price of Beer.’ What do you think, brothers? Tell me I’m not a funny one tonight!”

A debate began between Gusev and a gun-toting associate over a proposal to throw the two foreigners off the Foot. Vladimir suddenly found himself strangely weary. His watery eyelids began to close…

With the passing minutes, the voices of the men became gradually indistinct, sounding more like the insistent honking of geese than the rapid hooligan Russian that Gusev’s fellows preferred. And then…

THERE WAS AN unexpected sound. The make-believe sound of a Hollywood fairy tale. The sound of a getaway car squealing around a street corner and swerving into the narrow space between Gusev and his troops.

Jan got out of Vladimir’s Beamer looking like a domesticated loon in an ensemble of coarse-wool winter pajamas. “I have orders,” he shouted to Gusev and then to the former Interior Ministry troops. “Orders directly from the Groundhog. I’m exclusively authorized to take Girshkin home!”

Gusev calmly took out his gun.

“Move aside, sir,” Jan said to Gusev. “Let me help Mr. Girshkin up. As I’ve said, I have orders…”

Gusev grabbed the young Stolovan by his shoulders. He spun him around, then took hold of his pajama collar with one arm, sandwiching the gun into the folds of his neck with the other. “What orders?” he said.

For some time then, only the churning of his stomach reminded Vladimir of the passing of time, each revolution indicating yet another temporal unit in which he remained alive while Jan remained in Gusev’s grasp. Finally, his driver, not a small man but small beneath Gusev’s inflated face, reached into a leather holster wound beneath his pajamas and, hand shaking only slightly, took out a mobile phone. “The Groundhog has been following your whereabouts on the scanner,” Jan said to Gusev, his usually halting Russian now true and precise. “To speak truthfully, he is worried over Mr. Girshkin’s safety at your hands. If you would like, I will dial the Groundhog directly.”

The silence continued except for the metallic click of a weapon either being decommissioned or readied for combat. Then Gusev let go. He turned away quickly, leaving the defeat in his face to Vladimir’s imagination. The next thing that registered with Vladimir was the slam of a car door. A dozen motors started up, all nearly at once. A lone babushka, her voice as frail from sleep as from age, had opened up her window from across the street and started shouting for silence or she’d send for the police one more time.

Arranged horizontally in the back seat of his car, while the propped-up Cohen rode shotgun, Vladimir willed himself to pass out, if not into eternal sleep then at least into a subset of eternity. It was not possible. His head was a Central Casting of acne-scarred skinheads, hysterical policemen, fatigue-clad Interior Ministry braves, and, of course, the odd Soviet customs agent with sturgeon breath.

“You’ll be back, Yid,” the customs agent had said to Mother.