The Russian Debutante's Handbook

31. STARRING VLADIMIR AS PETER THE GREAT

HE WAS BACK.

Sure he had given fleeing some thought. And why not? His DeutscheBank account did contain around fifty thousand dollars—his commission from the Harold Green scam—which would last him awhile in someplace Vancouverish. But, no, that would be an overreaction. Not to mention cowardly.

A knowledgeable Russian lazing around in the grass, sniffing clover and munching on boysenberries, expects that at any minute the forces of history will drop by and discreetly kick him in the ass.

A knowledgeable Jew in a similar position expects history to spare any pretense and kick him directly in the face.

A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass, the face, and every other place where a kick can be reasonably lodged. Vladimir understood this. His take on the matter was: Victim, stop lazing about in the grass.

He woke up the next day to find himself lying beside Morgan’s ethereally pale back, the sides of her breasts rounding out beneath her like little pockets of rising dough. His darling was completely unaware of her Volodechka’s curious night.

His darling was completely unaware of many things. Because no matter what acts of political or romantic inanity she was performing with her Tomaš (likely some impoverished young Stolovan reeking of wet shoes and garlic), no matter the winged lion or minotaur or gryphon that lived in her sealed secret room, and no matter those fashionable American panic attacks that gave her the license to misbehave—ultimately, it would be Vladimir’s world, with its moral relativism, its animalistic worship of survival, that would leave Morgan short of breath.

In some ways it was a repeat of Vladimir’s grand battle with Fran, a battle between the luxury of ideas and the refugee’s foremost responsibility of staying alive, a battle between nebulous historical notions (Death to the Foot!) and the complicated facts on the ground—the Gusevs and their Kalashnikovs, the men with the shaved heads cruising the streets of the continent. And it was precisely Vladimir’s realism that made him a better person than Morgan, that coated him with the patina of tragedy, that excused his deviations from Normalcy and condemned Morgan’s deviations from the same.

Was he a good person or a bad person?

What a childish question.

HE MOVED.

Half an hour after he had awoken, five hours after he was nearly killed, Vladimir was at the Groundhog’s. Didn’t call, didn’t knock, just came and made himself known—let the whole world know who is this Girshkin that he doesn’t have to call or knock.

Visiting his boss was now a crosscultural experience. The Hog had left the “gangsta” compound, along with his latest girlfriend and secondary and tertiary consorts, for a new development hideously developing itself in a green corner of Greater Prava: the Brookline Gardens. Those familiar with the real Brookline, the one in Massachusetts, would not be disappointed. The Prava version was the apotheosis of North American upper-middle-classdom distilled in ten rows of dark brick townhouses and archways trellised with vine. An enormous sloping lawn at the entrance had been planted with pink, red, and white peonies to spell out “Welcome” in English; while in a far corner, a self-contained Food Court was already under construction, spreading out its feelers for the rest of the hypothetical mall. The only concession to local reality was the fact that the whole place would fall apart by the turn of the millennium.

Into this rarefied habitat came Vladimir with arms crossed and scowl at the ready. Peerless Jan (knighted, beatified, given a sweet bonus) dropped him off at the Groundhog’s unit on the corner of Glendale Road and MacArthur Place. The entrepreneur’s bodyguards were asleep in a station wagon parked in the driveway, their arms hanging out of the rolled-down windows like pinstriped tentacles. As promised, Vladimir did not knock. He walked right through the empty living room, his mobile phone at the ready, its antenna fully extended like a modern-day broadsword, to find the Groundhog breakfasting in his little breakfast nook.

The Groundhog looked up from his cornflakes. “Ah! Surprise!” he said, although that was clearly not what he meant, unless he was describing his own state of affairs. “Bozhe moi!” he said, which was closer to the truth. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s got to stop,” Vladimir said. He pointed his phone’s antenna into the triangle of flesh and hair laid bare by the Groundhog’s bathrobe. “I can be on a plane for Hong Kong tomorrow. Or Malta. I have a thousand schemes. I have a million connections.”

The Groundhog tried to appear incredulous. He came closest to the expression of Mr. Rybakov’s portrait directly above him. The middle-aged Fan Man, dressed in full military uniform, was trying to look dignified for the photographer, but already the lunacy of Soviet life was evident in the feral glint of his eyes, as if he was trying to say, “Put away your camera, civilian! I’ll give you something to remember me by!”

“Vladimir, stop,” the Groundhog said. “What is this madness?”

“Madness! Would you like to hear about madness? A convoy of armed ex–Interior Ministry troops in jeeps running around an almost-Western city, this to me is madness. Their commanding officer threatening the life of the vice president of a major investment company—this, once again, to me is madness.”

The Groundhog grunted and stirred his cereal. For some reason he had been eating it with a heavy wooden ladle, the kind more suited for a bowl of thick Russian porridge than American cornflakes. Through a pair of French doors slightly ajar, a woman’s rosy backside could be seen cavorting about the wood-and-chrome kitchen beyond the breakfast nook.

“Okay,” the Groundhog said, presumably after his stirring had rearranged the cornflakes just so. “What do you want from me? You want these Americanisms and globalisms? You want to take control? Then do so! Gusev won’t give you any problems. I can take away his jeeps and guns like that…” He forgot to snap his fingers. His eyes were glued to the service end of Vladimir’s mobile and they looked tired and dim, as if the only thing still keeping the Groundhog awake was the possibility of the antenna poking him in the eye.

“I want training sessions on becoming an American businessman for everyone in the organization,” Vladimir said. “Starting tomorrow.”

“Exactly as you want it, that’s how it will be.”

Vladimir tapped his antenna against the dining table, a half-moon of ashwood and computer-perfected design. It seemed that something remained unresolved, and, lost as he was in the Groundhog’s flurry of concessions, Vladimir couldn’t quite remember what it was. “Oh,” he said finally. “We’re opening a nightclub.”

“Wonderful,” the Groundhog said. “We could all use a nice disco.” He looked thoughtful for a minute. “Vladimir, please don’t hate me,” he said, “but if we are talking truthfully, then I must speak from the heart. Vladimir, my friend, why are you so distant from us? Why don’t you ever spend time with your Russian brothers? I’m not talking about Gusev and his kind, but what about me, what about the Groundhog? For instance, they tell me you have an attractive American girlfriend. Why have I not seen her? I love to see pretty girls. And why haven’t we gone out together, you and your girl and me and my Lena? There’s a new restaurant with an American flavor they’re opening here at the Food Court next month. It’s called Road 66 or something like that. Surely your girl will feel at home in such a place, and my Lenochka loves milkshakes.”

This indecent proposal floated in the air between them, finally settling on the ergonomic dining table between the corn flakes and the Air France coffee mug. A double date. With the Groundhog. And Morgan. And a creature named Lenochka. But before Vladimir could politely refuse the Groundhog’s invitation, a second consideration presented itself: Morgan to the Gulag! He was thinking, of course, of revenge. Revenge for Morgan’s Foot fetish, revenge for her homicidal babushkas, revenge for her slippery Tomaš. Yes, the time had come to teach his pampered little agitator a few useful facts about the cruel and hollow universe around her. And so—a double date! A little sampler of Girshkin World. A proper antidote to the Shaker Heights High School prom. My Dinner with Groundhog.

“You know, my girl is actually very curious about my Russian friends,” Vladimir said.

“So then we’re agreed!” The Groundhog happily slapped his shoulder. “We will toast her American beauty together!” He turned to the French doors leading to the kitchen and moved them apart with his feet, both shod in forest-green Godzilla slippers. “Have you met my Lena yet?” he asked, as more of his friend’s back became visible. “Would you like her to make you some porridge?”

BACK IN HIS Panelak flat, Vladimir paced his living room in a kind of angry stupor. Globalisms? Americanisms? What the hell was he talking about? Did he actually think he was going to introduce Gusev to the finer points of business-to-business marketing and public relations? What insanity!

The way things stood, only one man in Prava could help him. František. The happy apparatchik Vladimir had found during the Night of Men.

“Allo,” František picked up. “Vladimir? I was just about to ring you. Listen, I need to unload three hundred Perry Ellis windbreakers. Black-and-orange trim. Practically new. My cousin Stanka made some sort of an idiotic deal with a Turk… Any ideas?”

“Er, no,” Vladimir said. “Actually, I have a bit of a problem here myself.” He explained the nature of his predicament in a loud, frightened voice.

“I see,” František said. “Let me impart some advice. And remember, I’ve dealt with Moscow all of my adult life, so I know Gusev and his friends pretty well.”

“Tell me,” “Vladimir said.

“The Russians of this caliber, they only understand one thing: cruelty. Kindness is seen as a weakness; kindness is to be punished. Do you understand? You’re not dealing with Petersburg academicians here or enlightened members of the fourth estate. These are the people that brought half this continent to her knees at one point. These are murderers and thieves. Now tell me, how cruel can you be?”

“I have a lot of anger in store,” Vladimir confessed, “but I’m not very good at expressing it. Today, however, I lashed out at the Groundhog, my boss—”

“Good, that’s a good start,” František said. “Ah, Vladimir, we are not so different, you and I. We are both men of taste in a tasteless world. Do you know how many compromises I have made in my life? Do you know the things I have done…”

“Yes, I know,” Vladimir told the apparatchik. “I do not judge you.”

“Likewise,” František said. “Now, remember: cruelty, anger, vindictiveness, humiliation. These are the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Master them and you will do well. Tell these people how much you despise them and they will build you statues and mausoleums.”

“Thank you,” Vladimir said. “Thank you for the instruction. I will lash out at the Russians with my last strength, František.”

“My pleasure. Now, Vladimir… Please tell me… What the hell am I supposed to do with these goddamn windbreakers?”

THE AMERICAN LESSONS began the next day. The Kasino was set up school auditorium–style, with rows upon rows of plastic folding chairs. When the seats were filled, Vladimir did a double take: the Groundhog’s people numbered as many as parliamentarians of a sizable republic.

Half of them Vladimir had never met. In addition to the core groups of soldiers and crooks, there were the drivers of the BMW armada; the strippers who supplied labor to the town’s more elicit clubs; the prostitutes who worked the Kasino and, in lean times, covered the nightly beat on Stanislaus Square; the cooks for the common mess-hall who ran an international caviar-contraband operation on the side; the young men who sold enormous fur hats with the insignia of the Soviet Navy to Cold War aficionados on the Emanuel Bridge; the petty thieves who preyed upon older Germans straying from their tour groups—and that was only the personnel Vladimir could identify by their distinguishing combination of age, gender, demeanor, and gait. The majority of the congregants remained to him just so many other units of Eastern European refuse in their cheaply cut suits, their nylon parkas, their rooster haircuts, and teeth blackened by filterless Spartas, three packs per diem as life prescribed.

Forget Gusev. Forget the Groundhog. From now on they would all belong to Vladimir.

Vladimir took them by surprise. He ran out from the wings and kicked the oakwood lectern that had been stolen from the Sheraton and still bore its illustrious seal. “Devil confound it!” he shouted in Russian. “Look at you!”

The general incredulity and merriment that had pervaded the gathering stopped right there. No more giggling, no more loud slurping of the imaginary last drop out of an empty Coke can. Even old Marusya woke up from her opium nap. Gusev, seated alone in the last row, was glowering at Vladimir and fingering his holster. His troops, however, had been moved up front with the Groundhog. Yes, thought Vladimir, smiling at Gusev imperiously. Now we’ll see who whips the Groundhog in the banya…

“We’ve really done it, beloved countrymen,” Vladimir shouted, his whole body shaking from the adrenaline building up ever since the first ray of sun snuck in through the blinds and woke him, irrevocably, at 7:30 in the morning. “We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of all of Europe, we have truly shown our simple nature… For seventy years, we have been diligently licking clean an asshole, and it turns out to have been the wrong one!” Silence except for a spurt of laughter on one side, but one quickly nipped in the bud by surrounding colleagues. “What can account for such a gaffe, I ask you? We gave the world Pushkin and Lermontov, Tchaikovsky and Chekhov. We’ve embarked thousands of gawky Western youths on the Stanislavsky Method, and if truth be told, even that damned Moscow Circus is not half bad… So how do we now find ourselves in this situation? Dressed so ludicrously, a provincial from Nebraska would have cause to laugh, spending all our money on elegant cars just so we can butcher their insides with our bad taste, our women dressed in raccoon furs strolling Stanislaus Square giving all that young girls can give—their very girlhood—to the same Germans at whose hands our fathers and grandfathers perished in defense of the Motherland…”

At this mention there was predictable patriotic fervor among the ranks: bearlike rumbles of discontent, spittle hurtling to the concrete floor, and, here and there, mutterings of “disgrace.”

Vladimir picked up on this. “Disgrace!” he shouted. His mind was still ringing with František’s lecture on the four cornerstones of Soviet society. Cruelty. Anger. Vindictiveness. Humiliation. He took out a pocket pack of Kleenex, the only item in his vest pocket, and threw it on the floor for effect. He spat on it, too, then kicked it clear across the stage. “Disgrace! What are we doing, friends? While the Stolovans, the very same Stolovans who we ran over in ’69, are out there building townhouse condominiums and modern factories that work, we’re snipping Bulgarian balls like radishes! [laughter] And what did the Bulgarians ever do to deserve this, may I ask? They’re Slavs like us…”

(Slavs Like Us: The Vladimir Girshkin Story. Thankfully the crowd was too agitated to make light of Vladimir’s lack of Slavonity.)

“Well, you’re going to learn and you’re going to learn the hard way what it means to be a Westerner. Remember Peter the Great shaving Eastern beards and disgracing the Boyars?” Here he looked, just a glance, at Gusev and his closest men, who barely had the time to react. “Yes, I suggest you review your history texts, for that is exactly how it will be done. Those who are not with us are against us! And now, my poor, simple friends, here’s what you’re going to do first…”

And he told them.

IT WAS A day commemorating the transition from November to December, with the local trees hanging on to the last of yellow, the leaden sky cut with lines of ethereal blue where the whipping winds had cleared a swath through the pollution. The Russians, dressed in the black-and-orange Perry Ellis windbreakers that Vladimir now required of all employees, were sitting around the clearing (the same clearing where Vladimir and Kostya staged their athletic drills) like a ring of dark butterflies. In the background, an armada of twenty BMWs and a dozen jeeps were being cannibalized by a team of German mechanics in smocks.

Out came the zebra-striped seats, the woolly cup holders, the shocking Electric Plum ground effects—all tossed water-brigade–style past a line of bobbing blond heads and into the circle of the clearing. There, the personal offerings to the God of Kitsch were already assembled: the nylon tracksuits, the Rod Stewart compilations, the worn Romanian sneakers, everything that had qualified the Groundhog’s vast crew as Easterners, Soviets, Cold War–losers—all would be kindling for the flames.

As those lowest on the totem pole splashed gasoline across this burial ground of rosy-cheeked nesting dolls and giant lacquered soup ladles, some of the older women—Marusya, the opium lady, and her clique, in particular—began to whimper and make soft clicking sounds of regret. They wiped their eyes and adjusted each other’s head scarves, often collapsing into mournful embraces.

In a matter of seconds, the fire began its crackling susurrations. Then something unstable (perhaps it was the giant can of brilliantine with which Gusev’s men slicked back their thinning hair) exploded with a trace of orange into the darkening sky, and the crowd gaped at the pyrotechnics, the more adventurous young men bringing their hands forward for warmth.

The Groundhog, sighing with the entirety of his soft chest, took an impressive swig out of his vodka flask, then reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out the two fuzzy dice that had previously bounced one against the other from the rearview mirror of his BMW, like two puppies with just each other for amusement. He rubbed them together as if to create another fire, then sunk his nose inside one of them. After a few minutes of this melancholia, the Hog leaned back, smiled, closed his eyes, and cast both dice into the flames.

THROUGHOUT THE PROCEEDINGS in the auditorium and in the woods, those of an inquiring nature could turn around to see an attractive middle-aged gentleman with a PravaInvest visitor’s tag sitting apart from the herd and doodling in his little memo pad. In a white shirt and corduroy vest, with a gentle, bemused expression on his face, he appeared rather harmless. And yet despite the organization’s closely followed axiom that harmless people should always be sent to the hospital, no one dared approach this strange professorial man who chewed on his pen and smiled for no reason. He was more than harmless. He was František.

And he was impressed. “Brilliant!” he said to Vladimir, leading him away from the clearing and toward a wrecked suburban highway where Jan and the car were waiting. “You really are Postmodern Man, my friend. The bonfire and the self-denunciation contest… I must say, you are clown and ringmaster all at once! And thank you for helping me get rid of those infernal windbreakers.”

“Ah,” Vladimir said, clasping his hands to his bosom. “You don’t know how happy you’re making me, František. I can’t tell you how incomplete I was without you. I’ve been working on this stupid pyramid scheme for four months, and all I could get was a paltry quarter million out of some daft Canadian.”

Jan opened the car door and the two slipped onto the warm back seat. “Well, that will soon change, young man,” František said. “I have only one curious problem…”

“You have a problem?”

“Yes, my problem is that I am a sufferer of visions.”

“You suffer from visions,” Vladimir repeated. “I can recommend a doctor in the States…”

“No, no, no,” František laughed. “I am a sufferer of good visions! For instance, last night I had this dream… I saw a local congress hall being rented out for a caviar brunch… I saw a promotional film about PravaInvest broadcast on a screen of enormous proportions… By morning, I dreamed of twenty such brunches at five hundred persons per brunch. Ten thousand English-speakers, roughly one-third of the present expatriate population. All the children of mamas and papas from happier lands. All potential investors.”

“Aha,” Vladimir said. “I see such wonders as well, but I don’t quite understand how this film will be financed.”

“Now, it is fortunate for you,” said František, “that I have friends in this nation’s vast and underemployed film industry. Furthermore, my chum Jitomir manages a gargantuan conference center in the Goragrad district. As for the caviar, well, I’m afraid you’re on your own regarding the caviar.”

“No problems there!” Vladimir said and he acquainted František with the international caviar-contraband venture the Groundhog’s men had put together. As he divulged the dark and grainy details, the weather outside the car turned fickle, playing first with a palette of loose baby-pink clouds, then clearing the canvas to sear the approaching Golden City with brilliant sunshine. Each brightening and darkening made Vladimir all the more excited, for it confirmed that change was on the way. “Dear God!” he cried. “I believe we are ready to proceed!”

“No, wait,” František said. “That was hardly the sum of my visions,” he said. “I see more. I see us buying an industrial plant. A failed one, of course.”

“There’s one I’ve seen on the outskirts of town,” Vladimir said. “The Future Tek 2000. That one looked like it failed a century ago.”

“Yes, yes. My cousin Stanka bought a piece of the Future Tek. It’s a chemical plant that not only failed a century ago but actually exploded last year. Perfect. I must have supper with Stanka. But I see still more. I see that night club we talked about…”

“I see that, too,” Vladimir said. “We’ll call it the Metamorphosis Lounge in deference to Kafka and his mighty grip on the expatriate imagination. ‘Lounge’ is also a popular word these days.”

“I hear Drum N’ Bass music. I see a soft, fuzzy, highbrow kind of prostitution. I feel something up my nose. Cocaine?”

“Better still,” Vladimir said, “I have learned of a revolutionary new narcotic, a horse tranquilizer, which we can get in bulk by way of a French veterinarian.”

“Vladimir!”

“What? The horse tranquilizer is too outré?”

“No, no…” František’s eyes were still closed; the veins on his forehead were bulging with high concepts. “I see us listed on the Frankfurt Stock exchange!”

“Bozhe moi!”

“I see NASDAQ.”

“God help us.”

“Vladimir, we must act soon. No, forget soon. Today. Right now. This is a magical moment for those of us lucky enough to be in this part of the world, but it is no more than a moment. In three years Prava will be history. The expat crowds will be gone, the Stolovan nation will become a Germany in miniature. Now is the time to be alive, my young friend!”

“Hey, where are you taking me?” Vladimir asked, suddenly aware that they had crossed the New Town and were going to some mysterious burned-out district beyond.

“We’re going to make a movie!” František cried.

VLADIMIR’S FAVORITE Cold War coincidence? The uncanny similarities between the Soviet architectural style of the eighties and the cardboard sets of Star Trek, the grand American kitsch program of the sixties. Take, for instance, the 1987-built Gorograd District Palace of Trade and Culture which František had procured for his weekly caviar brunches and for screenings of PravaInvest: The Movie. Captain Kirk himself would have felt at home in this giant approximation of a twenty-fifth-century radiator. He would have plopped himself down on one of the orange plastic space chairs, which filled the auditorium’s starry interior, then looked on in exaggerated horror as the enormous viewing screen crackled to life, the voice of a fearsome enemy space creature announcing the following:

So now the truth would be revealed!

There they were: Vladimir and an African actor in a golf cart, swinging by an enormous white wall on which the words FutureTek 2000 were printed in futuristic corporate script. The wall ended and the golf cart pulled into a grassy field where happy workers of many ethnicities and sexual orientations cavorted beneath an ever-rising inflatable phoenix, PravaInvest’s rather shameless corporate symbol.

How about those Uzbek film studios! And the scale model of the tree-lined FutureTek campus, that postindustrial Taj Mahal!

Before a Bosnian was shown eating his torte, and after the Yupik Eskimo waved to the camera with their T-squares and protractors, Cohen and Alexandra were caught leaning over Cagliostro proofs engaged in heated (and, thankfully, silent) discussion. The camera made Cohen seem fat and thirtyish, while Alexandra, with her round face and dark curving lashes, looked positively Persian. A great cheer greeted the literary pair, a cheer that extended way beyond the Crowd (gorging itself on caviar in the first row) to all the youthful precincts in the auditorium. Even Morgan—her relationship with Vladimir still choppy and unsettled—looking tonight like a bored young embassy wife stuck in some Kinshasa or Phnom Penh, had to pick up her hands and clap at the image of her dear friend Alexandra. Yes, Cagliostro had been a stroke of genius, a marketing tool to be studied at Wharton. Too bad the damn thing still didn’t exist.

MEANWHILE, courtesy of the poet Fish, a package arrived from Lyon containing twenty vials of liquid horse tranquilizer, cooking instructions for transformation of said into snorting powder, and the most God-awful poetry to appear in an Alaskan literary journal. Vladimir took this loot to Marusya and explained the situation to her. She shook her balding head as if to say, “Nu, what’s in it for me?” Vladimir knew it wasn’t a matter of her antidrug principles. She tended to the opium garden with loving grace and surely skimmed off the top both in the garden and at her little concession stand. Hell, by nine in the morning when Vladimir went off for his jog with Kostya (Vladimir looking as cheerless as a conscript in a labor brigade), old Marusya was already tweaked enough to fumble on the obligatory dobry den’.

So a hard-currency compromise was reached, and Marusya, limping ahead like a blighted hobbit, took him down to the main building’s basement where several gas-fired stoves were lined in a row awaiting some devious purpose. They didn’t have to wait long. Inside their cracked ceramic interiors, the liquid horse tranquilizer was cooked at a tremendous temperature in an assortment of pots and pans. Once cooked, Marusya would flip the resulting wafer as gingerly as if it were a blin and set it to cool on a metal tray. Afterward, she’d go at it with a mallet until the wafer was reduced to a small mountain of snortable powder, which she would wrap into a little cellophane log and set out for Vladimir’s inspection. This she did while beaming with the pride of workmanship, her mouthful of gold teeth gleaming in the basement’s dusty air.

Vladimir assembled a nice stack of the little tranquilizer logs, although for the time being he didn’t know where to push them, what the right segue would be for offering up the fifteen-minute lobotomies to the Crowd and beyond. For that he would need his club, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

MC PAAVO ARRIVED a few days hence on a little turbo-prop bearing the Finnish cross on its tail. He couldn’t shut up even before he got off the plane. They heard his deep voice knocking about in the cabin while they waited on the tarmac: “MC Paavo in de haus! In de pan-European ’hood! Got de Helsinki beat, y’all can’t fuck wif!”

He was no older than František, only he hadn’t kept well at all: wrinkles carved deep to the order of the San Andreas Fault, a hairline in recession and not in the graceful arc of male-pattern baldness, but instead a jagged line, like soldiers beating a piecemeal retreat from the front. To maintain his youth he jabbered like a fifteen-year-old on crack, and sniffed at his armpits as if a great youthful elixir flowed from each. The Finn, only marginally tall, hugged František, ruffled his hair, and called him “My boy-ee,” while the former socialist globetrotter, unfamiliar with hip-hop expressions but never one to be left out, responded with “My girl,” and here the hilarity crested for a bit.

They took Paavo to the Kasino, where he dropped to his knees and crawled about a bit, citing amps and wattage and other technical specifications lost on our Soviet-bloc friends. “Great,” he said. “Knock out the two floors above and we ready to start pumpin.’”

This request actually gave Gusev’s men something constructive to do: They went after the glue-and-cardboard floors with electric staple-guns and machetes, with axes and grenade launchers, with protective goggles and a Russian’s unshakable hope that from destruction the Lord will create anew. By the time they were finished, not only the two floors above the Kasino were removed, but a skylight was knocked through the sixth floor as well. Vladimir, a resident of the Kasino building, found himself temporarily homeless, forced either to squat in Morgan’s pad or take a room at the Intercontinental. Despite his problems with Morgan, he resigned himself to the former.

The Russians’ hopes of providence, however, were not entirely unfounded. The Lord didn’t provide, but Harold Green did. The Canadian’s funds paid for a gorgeous, loopy discorama flanked by enough theme lounges to keep the saddest drunk happy. It was christened, as we already know, the Metamorphosis Lounge.

A NIGHT TO remember at the Metamorphosis Lounge? Good luck. You’ll need three omniscient narrators to cobble together half a narrative. But, what the hell, let’s try to maintain some dignity and recall what happened on night X, hour Y, in the main room, the Kafka Insecuritorium.

On that particular night the dance floor is hogged by the new arriviste crowd, Prava’s temporary “it” thing by dint of their impressive numbers and some sort of media-publishing party connection they share in New York–Los Angeles, with a stopover in London–Berlin. There they are: white people in chamois lounge suits and bug-eyed sunglasses, falling apart on the dance floor to the thumpa-thumpa of MC Paavo and the whirl of his techno fog. One gets up, another falls down. One takes off his shirt to reveal himself flabby and old, just as his girlfriend, sweaty and young, is waking up and putting on her bra: a miscommunication. Now they’re crying and hugging. Soon enough they’re waving to the captain’s table, shouting, “Vladimir! Alexandra!”

At the captain’s table the wave is returned. “Sure, I wouldn’t want to risk sending any of our men to Sarajevo right now,” Harold Green is shouting to Vladimir over MC Paavo’s twenty beats per second. Harry’s webbed face is further creased with concern as he is likely thinking about PravaInvest’s “bright and eager young specialists” dodging enemy fire behind the rump of a U.N. armored personnel carrier.

“Have another drink, Harold. We’ll talk Bosnia tomorrow.”

Speaking of Bosnia, there’s Nadija. She’s from Mostar or thereabouts, her face as chiseled as a constructivist bust of Tito, her body as long and purposeful as that of a socialist-worker heroine, the mother of a nation. There she goes, leading by the chin a small, bearded liberal-arts specimen with an eager hamster expression, a pouf of red hair, and a tragic limp. She’s not taking him to the Ministry of Love, though. Its twenty bunkbeds, truncheons, and prized Israeli water cannon are for a different, later part of the night. No, first, the pale gentleman must do away with modern malaise: It’s time for a visit to Grandmother Marusya’s Infirmary, where there’s borscht for colds, opium for headaches, and horse tranquilizer for overactive imaginations.

BACK AT THE insecuritorium… At the Captain’s Table, is that… Could it be? Alexandra and Cohen necking? Yes! Marcus the rugby runt, Alexandra’s ex-boyfriend, is gone—Daddy stopped wiring him funds, so it’s “back to naffing England for me, mate.” A closer look reveals Alexandra looking great tonight, formal in a spaghetti-strap dress and with her hair up. But the pouches under her eyes have the texture of leather, and then there’s the red swelling around her nostrils, a swelling from which sprout dark little hairs as thick and straight as dry grass. Someone’s been grazing at the horse stables one time too many.

But just look at her new beau. Cohen’s taken a beautiful old Armani sports jacket and roughed it up so that it is no longer a tool of oppression. He’s trimmed his beard and hair so that he looks five years older, with a doctoral thesis in the hopper. And now he’s wrapped his big arms around Alexandra and is telling her to calm down, that it’s all right, that she can drop her nightly dosage in the toilet, they’ll go to Crete next week to dance among the sheep, to drink mineral water and talk about themselves until it all makes sense. It’s hard to hear him above the bird squawks and jackhammer noises slipping off of MC Paavo’s turntable, but one can be sure that Cohen’s telling her that he loves her and he always has.

AND WHAT ABOUT Vladimir? At the other end of the Captain’s Table, there he is, watching Cohen neck with Alexandra, as Harold Green begins his latest series of mind-bending lectures on his Soros Foundation in the sky. Vladimir takes a long look around the Metamorphosis, this terra incognito that he and František and MC Paavo have wrought in the biblical span of forty days. It’s a late hour, much too late for a Monday—and it’s usually around this time that Vladimir starts to ask himself the questions that cannot be answered with a healthy application of horse tranquilizer or a sip of one of the U.S.$5.50 Belgian lagers that have made the Metamorphosis so hip and solvent.

For instance: What would Mother think of his clever new venture? Would she be proud? Would she consider his little pyramid scheme a cheap alternative to an MBA? Has he inadvertently created something that will please her? Come to think of it, is there really any difference between Mother’s corporate colossus and his scrappy PravaInvest? And was it true what they said, that childhood was destiny? That there was no escape?

Finally, the one question Vladimir Girshkin has been trying to avoid all night by waxing nostalgic about Mother and fate and greed and his own strange, inglorious path from victim to victimizer:

Where was Morgan?

32. DEATH TO THE FOOT

MORGAN WAS HOME.

Morgan was home a lot. Or she was teaching. Or she was wrestling with crazy old ladies. Or she was fucking Tomaš. It was hard to say. They didn’t talk much, Morgan and Vladimir. Their relationship had entered the stable, mutually dissatisfying stage of an old marriage. They were a bit like the Girshkins, each devoted more to their own tiny personal joys and vast private terrors than to each other.

How could they live like this?

Well, as we have seen, Vladimir, for the past month or so, has been working overtime to make PravaInvest the pyramid scheme to end all pyramid schemes forever. As for Morgan, she asked few questions about Vladimir’s flourishing bizness and she never made it out to the Metamorphosis either, claiming she wasn’t one for ear-popping Drum N’ Bass, and that she found Vladimir’s new pal František “a little creepy” and the whole horse tranquilizer scene deeply disturbing.

Fair enough. It was.

Now as for their intimacy, it continued. Prava is a fairly warm place in the fall and spring, but by mid-December the temperature inexplicably drops to Siberian levels, and members of the populace like to “get down” with one another—people of advanced age making out fearlessly in the metro, teenagers rubbing their butts together in the Old Town Square, and, in the freezing panelaks, to be without a partner blowing warm, beery breath up your crevices could mean a certain death.

So they pressed against each other. As they were watching the news, Morgan’s nose would sometimes be parked in between Vladimir’s nose and cheek, a particularly tropical place as Vladimir’s feverish body averaged 99.4 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. And sometimes, on a cold morning, he would warm his hands between her thighs, which, unlike her cold cheeks and icicle ears, seemed to retain most of her warmth; by Vladimir’s calculations, a polar winter could pass quite comfortably with his various extremities lodged between her thighs.

As for sweet nothings, the words “I love you” were said exactly twice in the course of five weeks. Once, inadvertently, by Vladimir after he had climaxed into her hand and she was casually wiping herself with a sandpapery Stolovan tissue, her expression peaceful and generous (remember the tent!). And once by Morgan after she had unwrapped Vladimir’s thoughtful Christmas present, Vaclav Havel’s collected works in Stolovan, with an introduction by Borik Hrad, the so-called Stolovan Lou Reed. “I guess it’s important to believe in something,” Vladimir had written on the title page, although his own shaky handwriting left him unconvinced of that sentiment.

So, as implied, along with jealousy, there was coitus. Why? Because for Vladimir, the possibility that Morgan might have been sharing her afternoons with Tomaš, while maddening in its own right, only increased his vigor in bed. Much as with Challah during her dungeon days, he was inspired by the idea that the woman he wanted also wanted to be with others. It’s a simple equation that exists between many lovers: He could not have her and so he desired her.

But, apart from his intimate needs, his anger at Morgan continued to grow apace, the lust and hurt sometimes working at cross-purposes and sometimes, as when he had to perform in bed, working in tandem. He felt powerless. What could he do to convince her that she loved him and not Tomaš, that she must renounce her murky secret life in favor of normalcy, affection, and arousal, that one must always be on the right side of history, eating roast boar at the Wine Archive instead of freezing to death in the Gulag?

But she wouldn’t understand him, stubborn Midwestern girl. So he worked on two fronts: To alleviate his lust, he crawled into bed beside her, but to alleviate his hurt, the best he could hope for was revenge. The best he could hope for was a certain double date. Hence when the Groundhog called to announce that Road 66, the restaurant in the Food Court of his townhouse estate, was ready to dish out hot curly fries in exchange for American dollars, Vladimir happily accepted on Morgan’s behalf.

THERE WAS ONE terribly cute thing about Morgan: Despite being nominally upper-middle-class, she owned only one formal outfit, the tight silk blouse she wore on her first date with Vladimir. Everything else in her closet was rugged and “built to last,” as they say in the States, for unlike Vladimir, she did not come to Prava to be the belle of the ball.

When they pulled up to Road 66, Morgan nervously tugged on the sleeves of this important blouse to make sure it covered her body just right. She smudged at her lipstick for the third time and scratched a front tooth for no apparent reason. “Shouldn’t it be called Route 66?” Morgan asked, upon scrutinizing the flashing restaurant sign. Vladimir winked mysteriously and kissed her cheek.

“Hey! Stop it,” she said. “I’ve got blush on. Look what you did.” She reached for her purse once again and Vladimir had to fight those unproductive feelings of tenderness as she blew her nose and repowdered her cheeks.

“Well if you, Morgan Jenson… ever plan… to motor West,” Vladimir sang as they walked arm-in-arm past the ten-acre gravel ditch that would soon become an American-style mall and toward the restaurant’s giant neon pimiento, “just take my way… that’s the highway… that’s the best.”

“How can you be singing?” Morgan said, once more blotting at her lips with a napkin. “I mean, we’re having dinner with your boss. Aren’t you, like, scared?”

“Get your kicks,” Vladimir crooned as he pulled at the door handles shaped like two plastic rattlesnakes, “on Route… Sixty-six.”

An awesome vista of cheap mahogany and American-themed tackiness greeted them, as the restaurant, just like the song, wound its way “from Chicago to L.A.… more than two thousand miles all the way,” with tables marked St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Flagstaff, “don’t forget Winona… Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino…”

The Groundhog and his girl were holed up in Flagstaff tonight. “Volodya, I got the cactus!” the Groundhog shouted to Vladimir across the vast restaurant. The Flagstaff table was indeed graced with a mighty glowing artificial cactus, much more imposing than, say, the ridiculous six-foot Gateway Arch of St. Louis or the deserted Geronimo Trading Post several tables into Arizona.

“They tell me there is always a waiting list for cactus,” the Groundhog soberly informed them in English while the introductions were made and the chocolate milkshakes ordered. As part of his Western training, Vladimir had forced the Hog to buy ten black turtlenecks and ten pairs of slacks from a specialized slacks company in Maine, and tonight the Groundhog looked like he was headed for a liberal-minded Upper West Side Thanksgiving dinner. As for the love of his life, Lenochka, well, an entire novel could be written about her, so there is only time to discuss her hair.

Let us say this: in the early 1990s, the Women of the West were favoring short cuts, pageboys, and curt little bobs, but Lena continued to celebrate her hair in the old Russian style. She refused to commit to wearing it either up or down, so she did both: A great mane crowned her shoulders, while an additional fifteen pounds of violent strawberry hair was pulled up by an enormous white bow. Beneath the cascades of hair there was a mil’en’koe russkoe lichiko, a pretty little Russian face with raised Mongolian cheekbones and a pointy nose. She wore exactly the same turtleneck-and-slacks outfit as the Groundhog, giving them the look of honeymooning tourists.

The Groundhog kissed Morgan’s hand. “Very much pleasure,” he said. “Tonight Lenochka and I practicing English, so please to correct Groundhog expression. I think in English I am called, eh, ‘Groundhog,’ but dictionary also saying ‘Marmot.’ Do you have such little animal in your country? Vladimir say everyone must speak English now!”

“I wish I remembered my Russian from college,” Morgan said and smiled in encouragement, as if Russian was still a global language worth learning. “I know a little Stolovan, but it’s just not the same.”

They were seated, the couples facing each other, and the Groundhog made himself appear manly by ordering food for everybody—garden burgers for the ladies and ostrich burgers for the men. “Also, three plates of curly fries with hot sauce,” he demanded of the waitress. “I love such shit.” He smiled broadly to his companions.

“So…” Vladimir said, unsure of how to get this little Revenge Dinner started.

“Yes…” Groundhog said and nodded at Vladimir. “So.”

“So…” Morgan smiled at Lena and the Groundhog. She was already cracking her knuckles under the table, poor thing. “So how did you two meet?” she asked. A great double-date question.

“Mmm…” The Groundhog smiled nostalgically. “Eh, is big story,” he said in his broken but strangely adorable English. “I tell it? Yes? Good? Okay. Big story. So one day Groundhog is in Dnepropetrovsk, so he is in Eastern Ukraina, and many people are doing to him bad thing and so Groundhog is doing to them also very bad thing and, eh, time goes tick tick tick tick on the clock, and after two revolvement of clock needle, after forty-eight hours passing away, it is Groundhog who is alive and it is enemies of him who are… eh… dead.”

“Wait,” said Morgan. “Do you mean…”

“Metaphorically speaking, they’re dead,” Vladimir interjected somewhat half-heartedly.

“So,” the Groundhog continued, “is finished bad business, but Groundhog still very lonely and very sad…”

“Ai, my Tolya…” said Lena, adjusting her bow with one hand and directing her milkshake straw with the other. “You see, Morgan, he has Russian soul… Do you understand what it is, Russian soul?”

“I’ve heard about it from Vladimir,” Morgan said. “It’s like…”

“It’s very nice,” Vladimir said. He gestured for the Hog to continue, knowing full well where his employer’s little tale was headed. Very nice, indeed.

“So, okay, lonely Groundhog has nobody in Dnepropetrovsk. His cousin kill himself last year and Dyadya Lyosha, distant relative, he die from drink. So is finish! No family, no friend, nothing.”

“Bedny moi surok,” said Lena. “How do you say in English… My poor Groundhog…”

“You know I can totally understand you,” Morgan said. “It’s so difficult to go to a strange town, even in America. I went to Dayton once, I was in a basketball camp…”

“Anyway,” the Hog interrupted. “So Groundhog is alone in Dnepropetrovsk and his bed is very cold and there is no girl for him to lie down on, and so he is going to, how do you say, publichni dom? The House of the Public? You know what this is…?”

Lena dipped a lone curly fry into a pool of hot sauce. “House of Girl, maybe?” she suggested.

“Yes, yes. Exactly such house. And so he is sitting down and Madame is coming in and she is introducing Hog to such and such girl and Groundhog is, like, Tphoo! Tphoo! He is spitting on the ground, because is so ugly. One, maybe, has face black like Gypsy, another having big nose, another speaking some Pygmy language, not Russian… And Groundhog is looking for, you know, special girl.”

“He is very cultured,” Lena said, patting his enormous hand. “Tolya, you should declaim for Morgan famous poema by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, called, eh…” she looked imploringly at Vladimir.

“The Bronze Horseman?” Vladimir guessed.

“Yes, correct. Bronze Horseman. Very beautiful poema. Everybody knows such poema. It is about famous statue of man on horse.”

“Lena! Please! I am telling interesting story!” the Hog shouted. “So Groundhog is leaving House of Girl, but then he hearing beautiful sound from room of love. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ It is like wonderful Slavic angel. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ Voice tender like young girl. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ He is asking Madame: ‘Tell me, who is making Okh?’ Madame is saying, oh, is our Lenochka making such Okh, but she is only for valuta, for, you know, hard currency. Groundhog is, like: ‘I have dollar, Deutsche mark, Finnish markka, nu, what you want?’ So Madame is saying, okay, sit down on divan for twenty minutes and soon you will have this Lena.’ So Groundhog sitting and sitting and he is hearing this beautiful ‘okh’ sound like bird singing to another bird, and he is suddenly becoming, eh… How do you say, Vladimir?”

He whispered a word in Russian. “Well…” Vladimir looked to Morgan. Her face was ashen and she was nervously twisting a drinking straw around one white finger as if applying a tourniquet. “Engorged, I guess,” Vladimir translated, softening the hard meaning a bit.

“Yes! Groundhog is becoming engorge in the foyer and he shouting, ‘Lena! Lena! Lenochka!’ And in the room of love she is shouting ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ And it is like duet. It is like Bolshoi opera. Shit! And so he get up, still gorged, and he run down quickly to local laryok and he is buying beautiful flowers…”

“Yes!” Lena said. “He is buying scarlet roses, just like in my favorite song, ‘A Million Scarlet Roses’ by Alla Pugacheva. So I know God is watching us!”

“And also I am buying expensive chocolate candy in shape of ball!”

“Yes,” Lena said. “I remember, from Austria, with each ball having picture of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I once study music in Kiev conservatory.”

They looked at each other and briefly smiled, mumbling a few words in Russian. Vladimir thought he heard the endearment “las-tochka ti moya,” which meant roughly “you’re my little swallow.” The Hog quickly smooched Lena and then looked back at his tablemates, a little embarrassed.

“Aaa…” the Groundhog said, losing the thread of his tale for a moment. “Yes. Lovely story. So I run up to House of Girl and Lena is already finish with her bad business, and she is washing up, but I don’t care, I open door to her room, and she is standing there, wiping with towel, and I have never seen this… Oh! Skin white! Hair red! Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi! Oh, my God! Russian beauty! I am getting down on my foot and I give her flower and Mozart ball, and, and…” He looked to Lena and then to Vladimir and then back to his beloved. He put his hand to his heart. “And…” he whispered.

“And so four months later, we are here with you at table,” the practical Lena summed up for him. “So tell me,” she asked the near-catatonic Morgan, “how did you meet Vladimir?”

“At a poetry reading,” Morgan mumbled, looking around the room, perhaps trying to find a fellow law-abiding American to connect with. No such luck. Every second customer was a horny Stolovan biznesman in a double-breasted purple jacket, a pleasant twenty-year-old companion on his arm. “Vladimir is a very good poet,” Morgan said.

“Yes, he is maybe poet laureate,” Lena laughed.

“He was reading a poem about his mother at the Joy,” Morgan said, trying to take the high road. “It was about how he went to Chinatown with his mother. It was very beautiful, I thought.”

“Russian man loves his mother.” The Groundhog sighed. “My mama died in Odessa, year 1957, from death of kidney. I was only little child then. She was hard woman, but how I wish I could kiss her good night one more time. All I have in entire world now is papa in New York, he is sailor-invalid. This is how I hear of Vladimir. He help my papa get U.S. citizenship by making crime against American immigration service. So he is also criminal laureate, my Volodechka!”

Morgan put down her Road 66 garden burger and glared at Vladimir, a bead of ketchup on her upper lip. “Yes, what can I say?” Vladimir said, shyly addressing the Groundhog’s charge of criminality. “There was some intrigue with the INS. I helped out as best I could. Oh, what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

“Groundhog one day tell me funny story,” Lenochka said, “about how Vladimir take money from rich Canadian and then he sells horse drug to Americans in club. You have very clever boyfriend, Morgan.”

Morgan painfully nudged Vladimir’s shoulder. “He’s an investor,” she said. “He invested Harold Green’s money into a club. And he’s not dealing drugs. It’s that Finn. MC Paavo.”

“Take, invest, what’s the difference?” Vladimir said. But he made a note to ease up on the jolly candor, lest it imperil his pyramid scheme. Morgan, after all, remained friends with Alexandra and, by extension, the Crowd, PravaInvest’s trendy cornerstone. Still, when he leaned over to wipe the ketchup off Morgan’s shaky upper lip he also managed to whisper into her ear, “Morgan to the Gulag!” and “Death to the Foot, honey!”

He just wanted to let her know where things stood.

THE FIGHTING STARTED in the car, right after Vladimir’s final wave to Lena and the Groundhog. Jan was cruising past the darkened townhouses of the Brookline Gardens (some homes still wearing their holiday wreaths and “Merry Xmas” signs), trying to find Westmoreland Street, the smooth, paved artery which connected the Groundhog’s suburban fairy tale with Prava’s pot-holed municipal highway, its dying factories, and crumbling panelaks. Meanwhile Morgan was loudly exploring her feelings.

“He met his girlfriend at a whorehouse!” she was shouting as if that had been the most egregious news of the evening. “He’s a fucking gangster… And you! And YOU!”

“Quite a surprise, eh?” Vladimir said in an ambiguously low tone. “It’s terrible when people aren’t honest with one another.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, Morgie… Let’s see. Tomaš. Death to the Foot. What do you think?”

“What does Tomaš have to do with anything?” she shouted.

“You’re fucking him.”

“Who?”

“Tomaš.”

“Oh, please.”

“Then what?”

“We’re working on a project together.” She pulled a used soda can out of a cup holder and began crushing it with all of her considerable strength.

“A project? Do tell me more…”

“It’s a political project, Vladi. You wouldn’t be interested. You’re more into stealing money from poor Canadians and getting your friends hooked on that horse shit.”

“Mmm, a political project. How fascinating. Maybe I can help. I’m a pretty civic-minded guy, you know. I’ve read Lenin’s State and Revolution at least twice in college.”

“You’re a beautiful man, Vladimir,” Morgan said.

“Oh, fuck you, Morgie. What’s the project? You’re going to blow up the Foot or something? There’s dynamite in that sealed room of yours? You and Tommy are going to light the fuse during the May Day parade? Dead babushkas as far as the eye can see…”

Morgan threw her empty soda can at Vladimir where it momentarily stung his left ear and rattled off one tinted window. “Boy and girl, please be good to expensive car,” Jan remarked from the driver’s seat.

“What the hell was that?” Vladimir hissed at her. “What the hell did you do that for?” Morgan said nothing. She stared out her window at the pyrotechnics of an overturned oil truck in the middle of the highway, firemen in Day-Glo jackets waving Jan onto a side road. “Are you fucking crazy?” Vladimir said.

Morgan remained silent and this silence made Vladimir both enraged and a little giddy. “Oooh, was I right?” he taunted, scratching his offended ear. “You gonna blow up the Foot, eh? Little Morgan and her platonic buddy Tommy gonna blow up the Foot!”

“No,” Morgan said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No,” she said once more. But the “No” repeated twice would be her undoing.

No, Vladimir thought. What the hell did that mean? He took her first “No” at face value, then he added the second “No” and then he threw in her long silence plus the brutal attack with the soda can. What was he thinking now? But it couldn’t be. Death to the Foot? No. Yes? No. But how?

“Morgan,” Vladimir said, suddenly serious. “You’re not going to blow up the Foot, are you? I mean that would just be…”

“No,” Morgan said for the third time, still looking away. “It’s nothing like that.”

“Jesus Christ, Morgan,” Vladimir finally said. Sealed room. Crazed babushkas. Semtex? That one clichéd word announced itself uninvited. “Semtex?” Vladimir said.

“No,” Morgan whispered, still looking outside her window at the dregs of urban Prava, an abandoned railroad station, a television tower lying on its side, a socialist-era swimming pool filled with dismantled tractors.

“Morgan!” Vladimir said, reaching over to touch her but deciding otherwise.

“You don’t understand anything,” Morgan said. She covered her face with her hands. “You’re just a little boy,” she said. “An oppressed immigrant. That’s what Alexandra calls you. What the hell do you know about oppression? What do you know about anything?”

“Oh, Morgan,” Vladimir said. He couldn’t help but feel a swift and ambiguous sadness. “Oh, Morgan,” he repeated. “What have you gotten yourself into, honey?”

“Give me your mobile…” Morgan said.

“What?”

“You want to meet him… Is that what you want? Mr. Vladimir Girshkin. Criminal laureate. I can’t believe what you just put me through at that dinner. That poor stupid woman. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ I can’t believe any of you people… Give me your phone!”

AND SO IT was done. A connection was made. Two hours later. Half past midnight. Back at Morgan’s panelak. He came with a partner. “This is my friend,” Tomaš announced. “We call him Alpha.”

Waiting for the Stolovans, Vladimir had helped himself to several vodka shots and was on the verge of becoming boisterous. “Hey there, Alpha!” he shouted. “Are you part of a team? Like Team Alpha? Oooh… I love you guys already.”

“I have no money,” Tomaš said to Morgan. “Taxi is waiting outside. Could you…” Without a word Morgan ran off to pay the taxi.

“How about I fix you a drink, Tommy,” Vladimir said. “Alpha, what are you having?” Vladimir was recumbent in his usual place on the sofa, while the two Stolovans remained standing across the room, their postures hunched and guarded as if Vladimir was a wild ocelot that might attack at any moment.

“I’m not a drinker,” Tomaš said, and by Vladimir’s estimation he wasn’t much of anything. A slight man with pink, scaly patches of psoriasis on his cheeks and a thicket of receded yellow hair that formed a natural mohawk, he was dressed in an old trench coat with thick glasses that verged on safety goggles, and a bright shirt, possibly of Chinese origin, which peeked out of his coat. Alpha looked rather similar (both had their hands jammed into their coat pockets and were blinking a lot), except Tomaš’s sidekick was entirely missing a set of eyebrows (industrial accident?) and had a telephone cord tied around the waist of his trench coat. Without knowing it, the two gentlemen were actually on the cutting edge of fashion, wearing what in New York would soon be called “Immigrant Chic.”

“I thought, or rather, I am thinking now,” Tomaš declared, “that I am to blame for problems here. I should have come to you forthly. Yes? Forthly? Excuse my English. In affairs between man and woman, honesty must be the lodestar by which we navigate.”

“Yeah,” Vladimir said as he loudly sucked on a lemon. “Lodestar. You said it, Tommy.” Now why was he being so mean to this unfortunate man? It wasn’t exactly jealousy over Tomaš’s affair with Morgan. It was… What? A sense of overfamiliarity? Yes, in some way, this pockmarked Tomaš was like a long-lost landsman. What a thought: for all his posturing, very little separated Vladimir from his ex-Soviet brethren, from the childhoods spent lusting after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, drinking endless cups of homemade yogurt for dubious health reasons, and dreaming of someday bombing the Americans into submission.

Tomaš, for his part, ignored Vladimir’s remarks. “I was privileged,” he said, “to be Morgan’s companion from 12 May 1992 through 6 September 1993. On the morning of 7 September, she ended our love relationship and we have been since then steadfast friends.” He looked imploringly toward Vladimir’s vodka bottle and then down to the pair of broken moccasins on his feet. As soon as he spoke with those awkward gooey lips, his red ears flapping along to the sound of each consonant, Vladimir knew it was true: Tomaš was no longer in the running. Poor guy. There was something indubitably unsettling about having to confess one’s failure as a lover. Then again, Vladimir tried to picture the little Stolovan with the big flattened nose and ruined skin on top of Morgan and immediately felt all the more sorry for her. What the hell was she thinking? Did she have some sort of a fetish for Eastern European sad sacks? And if so, where did that leave Vladimir?

“What do you think of all this, Alpha?” Vladimir asked Tomaš’s partner.

“I have never known love,” Alpha confessed, tugging at his telephone cord. “Women do not think of me as this type of guy. Yes, I am alone, but I do many things to keep busy… I am very busy with myself.”

“Wow,” Vladimir said sadly. Being with these two made him feel lost and disoriented, as if his traditional outsider’s place in the social hierarchy had been completely usurped. “Wow,” he repeated, trying to imbue the word with a kind of empty Californian inflection.

Morgan came back into the flat, averted her eyes from her lover and ex-lover, and busied herself with taking off her snow-covered galoshes. “You know, I’m actually starting to like your friends,” Vladimir told her. “But I still can’t believe that you and Tomaš here once shared a bed… He’s not exactly…”

“To you I am so-called drip,” Tomaš said plainly. “Or, perhaps, nerd or bore.” He bowed a little as if to show how comfortable he was with his identity.

“Tomaš is a wonderful man,” Morgan said, taking off her sweater, dressed now only in the famous silk blouse. The three Eastern Europeans paused to examine her silhouette. “There’s a lot you could learn from him,” Morgan continued. “He’s not an egoist like you, Vladimir. And he’s not even a criminal. How about that!”

“Maybe I’m missing something here,” Vladimir said, “but I thought that blowing up a hundred-meter statue in the middle of the Old Town constituted a crime.”

“He knows about the Foot destruction!” Tomaš shouted. “Morgan, how you can tell? We are bound by blood!” Alpha, too, looked shaken by this news. He pressed his hand to his breast pocket, where a Stolovan–English dictionary and some computer diskettes likely resided.

“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Morgan said in a tone so blasé it was scary. “I’m privy to some info on his PyramidInvest—”

He’ll keep his mouth shut?… Privy?… Oh, this Morgan was hardboiled! “Tell me,” Vladimir asked her, “wasn’t it a little dangerous for us to live here in this shoddy panelak, the very earth shaking from the tremors of our fucking [slight look of discomfort on Tomaš’s part] while hundreds of kilograms of Semtex were stowed in the next room?”

“Not Semtex,” Alpha said. “We prefer C4, American explosive. We trust only American. Nothing good left in our world.”

“You fellows are ready for the Young Republicans, I do believe,” said Vladimir.

“C4 is very good explosive to control,” Alpha went on, “and also strong with TNT equivalency of one hundred eighteen percent. Placed at, mmm, such and such interval within Foot and activated by external source, I think result will be that the top of Foot implodes… What I am meaning is that top of Foot will collapse inside hollow of Foot itself. Most important caveat: Nobody get hurt.”

“I take it you’re the munitions expert,” Vladimir said.

“We are both students at the Prava State University,” Tomaš explained. “I am studying at faculty of philology and Alpha studying at faculty of applied science. So I am working out theory for destruction of Foot and Alpha designing explosion materials.”

“Exactly,” Alpha said, fluttering his hands inside his coat pockets like an anxious bird. “How do you say? He is the intellectual and I am the materialist.”

“I don’t get it,” Vladimir said. “Why don’t you two just get jobs at one of those nice German multinationals on Stanislaus Square? I’m sure you’re both quite handy with computers and your English is primo. If you learn to speak a little office Deutsche and maybe pick up some new tennis shoes at the Kmart I’m sure you’ll be raking in the crowns.”

“We are not averse to working for this company you mention,” Tomaš said, as if Vladimir had just offered them a job. “We would like to live nice life and make babies too, but before we can make this future we must take care of the sad history.” He looked meaningfully to Morgan.

“I see,” Vladimir said. “And by blowing up the Foot, you’re… taking care of that… Ah, that pesky history!”

“You don’t know how their families have suffered!” Morgan suddenly said. She was staring at Vladimir with those dead gray eyes, her political eyes, or perhaps the eyes of some greater unhappiness.

“Oh, yes,” Vladimir said. “How right you are, Morgan. What do I know? You see, I was actually brought up by Rob and Wanda Henckel of San Diego, California. Yes, a healthy childhood spent watching the Pacific surf crash at my big suntanned feet, a four-year stint at UCSD, and now here I am, Bobby Henckel, senior brand manager of Flo-Ease Laxatives for the Eastern region… That’s right, Morgan, please do tell me more about what it’s like to be from this part of the world. It all sounds so damn exotic and, jeez, kinda sad, too… Stalinism, you say? Repression, eh? Show trials, huh? Wowsers.”

“It’s different for you,” Morgan muttered, glancing at Tomaš for support. “You’re from the Soviet Union. Your people invaded this country in 1969.”

“It’s different for me,” Vladimir repeated. “My people. Is that what you’ve been telling her, Tom? Is this the world according to Alpha? Ah, my dear stupid fellows… Do you know how similar we are, the three of us? Why, we’re the same proto-Soviet model. We’re like human Ladas or Trabants. We’re ruined, folks. You can blow up all the Feet in the world, you can rant and rave through the Old Town Square, you can emigrate to sunny Brisbane or Chicago’s Gold Coast, but if you grew up under that system, that precious gray planet of our fathers and forefathers, you’re marked for life. There’s no way out, Tommy. Go ahead, make all the money you want, hatch those American babies, but thirty years later you’ll still look back at your youth and wonder: What happened? How could people have lived like that? How could they have taken advantage of the weakest among them? How could they have spoken to each other with such viciousness and spite, much as I’m speaking to you right now? And what’s that strange coal-like crust on my skin that clogs the shower drain every morning? Was I part of an experiment? Do I have a Soviet turbine instead of a heart? And why do my parents still quake every time they approach passport control? And who the hell are these children of mine in those Walt Disney World parkas running around making noise like there’s nothing to stop them?”

He got up and walked over to Morgan, who shifted her gaze away from him. “And you,” he said, recovering some of the anger he had lost during his speech to the Warsaw Pact duo. “What are you doing here? This isn’t your battle, Morgan. You have no enemies here, not even me. That pretty Cleveland suburb, that’s for you, honey. This is our land. We can’t help you here. Not any of us.”

He finished his drink, felt the surge of its lemony warmth, and, quite unsure of what he was doing, walked out of the apartment.

WIRY GUSTS OF wind were prodding frozen Vladimir forward, jabbing at his back with sharp-nailed fingers. He was wearing nothing more than a sweater, a woolen pair of winter janitor pants, and some long underwear. And yet the deadly circumstances of being caught coatless on an icy January night did not bother Vladimir. A steamy river of alcohol ran through him.

He tumbled ahead.

Morgan’s building was an isolated structure, but further in the distance, beyond a ravine that concealed an old tire factory, there decamped a regiment of condemned panelaks, which, with their rows of broken windows, looked like short, toothless soldiers guarding some long-sacked fortress. Now, there was a sight! The five-story concrete tombstones, perched on a little hill, were slouching toward the ravine, one building having shed its facade entirely so that the tiny rectangles of its rooms were exposed to the elements like a giant rat maze. Chemical flames emanating from the tire factory in the gorge below lit up the building’s ghostly recesses, reminding Vladimir of grinning holiday jack-o’-lanterns.

And once again, the undeniable feeling that he was home, that these ingredients—panelak, tire factory, the corrupted flames of industry—were, for Vladimir, primordial, essential, revelatory. The truth was that he would have ended up here anyway, whether or not Jordi had taken out his member in that Floridian hotel room; the truth was that for the last twenty years, from Soviet kindergarten to the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, all the signs had been pointing to this ravine, these panelaks, this sinking green moon.

He heard his name being called. Behind him, a small creature was steadily advancing, bearing in its arms what seemed to be another creature, which on closer inspection proved to be only a dead coat.

Morgan. She was wearing her ugly peacoat. He heard the crunch-crunch of her footsteps in the snow and saw clouds of her breath puffing skyward at regular intervals like the effusions of an industrious locomotive. Other than her footfalls there was complete silence, the winter silence of a forgotten Eastern European suburb. They stood facing each other. She handed him the coat and a pair of her fluffy purple earmuffs. He figured it must have been the brutal cold that was filling her eyes with steady tears, because when she spoke it was in her usual collected manner. “You should come back to the house,” she said. “Tomaš and Alpha are getting a taxi. We’ll be alone. We can talk.”

“It’s nice here,” Vladimir said, slipping on the earmuffs, gesturing at the ruined buildings and smoky ravine behind him. “I’m glad I took a walk… I feel much better.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but already his voice was lacking in malice. It was hard to think of a reason to hate her. She had lied to him, yes. She had not trusted him the way lovers sometimes trust one another. And so?

“I’m sorry about what I said,” Morgan said. “I talked with Tomaš.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vladimir said.

“Still, I’d like to apologize…”

Vladimir suddenly reached out and rubbed his hands on her cold cheeks. It was the first contact they had had in hours. He smiled and heard his lips crack. The situation was clear: They were two astronauts on a cold planet. He was, for his part, a gentle dissembler, a dodgy investment guru with his hands in many pockets. She was a terrorist who drove tent stakes into the ground, who cradled mewing stray cats in her arms, not to mention the poor Tomaš. Vladimir was weighing his words to best describe this arrangement, but soon found himself speaking rather indiscriminately. “Hey, you know, I’m proud of you, Morgan,” he said. “This thing, this blowing up the Foot, I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I’m glad you’re not just another Alexandra editing some stupid lit mag with a funky Prava address. You’re like on a… I don’t know… some kind of Peace Corps mission… Except with Semtex.”

“C4,” Morgan corrected him. “And nobody’s going to get hurt, you know. The Foot’s going to—”

“I know, implode. I’m just a little worried about you. I mean, what if they catch you? Can you imagine yourself in a Stolovan jail? You’ve heard the babushkas’ war cry. They’ll send you to the gulag.”

Morgan narrowed her eyes in thought. She rubbed her mittens together. “But I’m an American,” she said. She opened her mouth again, but there was nothing more to say on the subject.

Vladimir absorbed her arrogance and even laughed a little. She was an American. It was her birthright to do as she pleased. “Besides,” Morgan said, “everybody hates the Foot. The only reason it didn’t get knocked down is because of official corruption. We’re just doing what everyone wants. That’s all.”

Yes, blowing up the Foot was actually democratic. A manifestation of the people’s will. She really was an emissary from that great proud land of cotton gins and habeas corpus. He remembered their first date all those months ago, the eroticism of her snug bathrobe and easygoing ways; once again, he wanted to kiss her mouth, lick the brilliant white pillars of her teeth. “But what if you do get caught?” Vladimir said.

“I’m not the one that’s gonna blow it up,” Morgan said, wiping her teary eyes. “All I’m doing is storing the C4, because my apartment is the last place anyone would look.” She reached over and fixed his earmuffs so that they corresponded directly with his ears. “And what if you get caught?” she said.

“What do you mean?” Vladimir asked. Him? Caught? “You’re talking about this PravaInvest shit?” he said. “It’s nothing. We’re just ripping off a few rich people.”

“It’s one thing to steal from that spoiled Harry Green,” Morgan said, “but getting Alexandra and Cohen hooked on some awful horse drug… that’s fucked up.”

“It’s really that addictive, huh?” Vladimir said. He was heartened by the fact that she was assigning relative values to his misdeeds—drug dealing, bad; investor fraud, less bad. “Well, maybe I should phase that stuff out,” he said. He looked to the overcast skies pondering his horse tranquilizer’s vast profit margins, substituting horse powder for stars.

“And that Groundhog,” Morgan said. “I can’t believe you would want to work for someone like that. There’s, like, nothing redeeming about him.”

“They’re my people,” Vladimir explained to her, holding his hands up to demonstrate the messianic concept of my people. “You have to understand their plight, Morgan. The Groundhog and Lena and the rest of them—it’s as if history’s totally outflanked them. Everything they grew up with is gone. So what are their options now? They can either shoot their way through the gray economy or make twenty dollars a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk.”

“But don’t you find it dangerous to be around maniacs like that?” Morgan asked.

“I suppose,” Vladimir said, enjoying the furrowed look of concern on her face. “I mean there’s this one guy, Gusev, who keeps trying to kill me, but I think I’ve nailed him pretty good for now… You see, I usually whip the Groundhog in the bathhouse with birch twigs… It’s like this ceremonial thing that I do… And Gusev used to… Well, for one thing, Gusev is this murderous anti-Semite—”

He stopped. For a few frozen moments the burden and the limitations of Vladimir’s life seemed to float along on his breath like cartoon captions. By then, they had been standing on the extraterrestrial surface of Planet Stolovaya for over ten minutes with only their earmuffs and mittens providing life support. The wintry landscape and the natural loneliness it engendered was taking its toll; at once, without prompting, Vladimir and Morgan embraced, her ugly peacoat against his fake-fur–collared overcoat, earmuff to earmuff. “Oh, Vladimir,” Morgan said. “What are we going to do?”

A gust of tire-factory smoke disgorged itself from the ravine and took on the shape of a magical jinni just released from his glassy prison. Vladimir pondered her reasonable question, but came up with one of his own. “Tell me,” he said, “why did you like Tomaš?”

She touched his cheek with her arctic nose; he noticed that her proboscis always seemed a bit more globular and full-bodied at night, perhaps the work of shadows and his failing eyesight. “Oh, where do I start?” she said. “For one thing, he taught me everything I know about not being American. We were penpals in college, and I remember he’d send me these letters, these endless letters I could never completely understand, about subjects I knew nothing about. He wrote me poems with titles like ‘On the Defacement of the Soviet Rail Workers’ Mural at the Brezhnevska Metro Station.’ I guess I took Stolovan and history classes just to figure out what the hell he was talking about. And then I landed in Prava and he met me at the airport. I can still remember that day. He looked absolutely hopeless with that sad face of his. Hopeless and darling and also like he desperately needed me to touch him and to be close with a woman… You know, sometimes that’s a good thing, Vladimir, to be with a person like that.”

“Hmm…” Vladimir decided that he had heard just about enough on the subject of Tomaš. “And what about me—” he started to say.

“I liked that poem you read at the Joy,” Morgan said, kissing his neck with her glacial lips. “About your mother in Chinatown. You know what my favorite line was? ‘Simple pearls from her birthland… Around her tiny freckled neck.’ It was awesome. I can totally see your mother. She’s like this tired Russian woman and you love her even though you’re so different from her.”

“It was a stupid poem,” Vladimir said. “A throwaway poem. I have very complicated feelings for my mother. That poem was just bullshit. You have to be very careful, Morgan, not to fall in love with men who read you their poetry.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Morgan said. “It was nice. And you were right when you said that you and Tomaš and Alpha had a lot in common. Because you do.”

“I had meant that in an abstract sense,” Vladimir said, thinking of Tomaš’s psoriasis-scarred face.

“See, here’s the thing about you, Vladimir,” she said. “I like you because you’re nothing like my boyfriends back home and you’re nothing like Tomaš either… You’re worthwhile and interesting, but at the same time you’re… You’re partly an American, too. Yeah, that’s it! You’re needy in a kind of foreign way, but you’ve also got these… American qualities. So we have all these overlaps. You can’t imagine some of the problems I had with Tomaš… He was just…”

Too much of a good thing, Vladimir thought. Well then, here was the scorecard: Vladimir was fifty percent functional American, and fifty percent cultured Eastern European in need of a haircut and a bath. He was the best of both worlds. Historically, a little dangerous, but, for the most part, nicely tamed by Coca-Cola, blue-light specials, and the prospect of a quick pee during commercial breaks.

“And we can go back to the States when all this is over,” Morgan said, grabbing his hand and starting to pull him back to her panelak with its promise of stale Hungarian salami and a glowing space heater. “We can go home!” she said.

Home! It was time to go home! She had selected her quasi-foreign mate of a line-up of wobbly candidates, and soon it would be time to head back to Shaker Heights. Plus, as an added bonus, she didn’t even have to declare him at customs; Citizen Vladimir had his own shiny blue passport embossed with a golden eagle. Yes, it was all coming together now.

But how could Vladimir abandon all that he had achieved? He was the King of Prava. He had his very own Ponzi scheme. He was avenging himself for his entire rotten childhood, swindling hundreds of people who most likely deserved his vengeance. He was going to make Mother proud. No, he wouldn’t go home!

“But I’m making money here,” Vladimir protested.

“It’s okay to make some money,” Morgan said. “We could always use the money. But Tomaš and I are going to wrap it up with the Foot pretty soon. We’re thinking maybe April or so for the detonation. You know, I can’t wait for that damn thing to explode already.”

“Eh…” Vladimir paused. He was attempting, momentarily, to order and catalog her entire psychology. Let’s see. Blowing up the Foot was an act of aggression against the father, right? Therefore, Stalin’s Foot represented the authoritarian constraints of a Middle American family, ja? A Day in the Life of Morgan Jenson, that sort of thing. So her panic attacks were gone because, to quote her campus shrink, Morgan was lashing out. At the Foot. With Semtex. Or C4, rather.

“Morgan—” Vladimir started to say.

“Come on,” she said. “Walk faster. I’ll make us a bath. A nice warm bath.”

Vladimir dutifully increased his pace. He looked back once more at the condemned panelaks and at the blazing ravine, and noticed the quadruped figure of a stray dog pawing the edge of the precipice, trying to see if it could slip down to the warmth of the tire factory without losing its canine footing. “But Morgan!” Vladimir shouted, yanking her coat sleeve, suddenly worried about the most elemental thing of all.

She turned around and presented him with the Face of the Tent, the halo of sympathy he had found in her eyes after he had climbed on top of her. Oh, she knew what he wanted, this shivering homeless Russian man in a pair of purple earmuffs from Kmart-Prava. She grabbed his hands and pressed it to her heart buried deep beneath her peacoat. “Yes, yes,” she said, hopping on one foot to keep warm. “Of course, I love you. Please just don’t worry about that.”

33. LONDON AND POINTS WEST

HE LEARNED NOT to worry about it. He put his arms around her. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. She must have done likewise.

Their devotion to their strange projects was inspiring. They were as busy as New York office workers and Vladimir, for his part, just as productive. By the end of the year the PravaInvest juggernaut had rumbled across the expatriate landscape to collect over five million U.S. dollars through sales of its uncommon stock, its brisk business in veterinarian supplies, and the quick turnover at the Metamorphosis Lounge. The FutureTek 2000 even presented the public with a shiny plastic box labeled “fax modem.”

The dedicated staff was mobilized. Kostya took the financial reigns, František ran the burgeoning agit-prop machine, Marusya performed daily miracles out in the opium fields, Paavo dropped “phat” beats with distinction, and Cohen even managed to turn out a spiffy little literary journal.

Yes, a lot had happened to Cohen since the misadventure with Gusev and the skinheads, his much-trumpeted liaison with Alexandra being but one long ostrich feather in his mighty rabbit-fur cap. Recently, for example, Vladimir’s friend had delved into Cagliostro in a way that, clearly, he had never delved into anything before. Each week he managed to spend at least fifty hours at the computer, surprising himself with what his single-mindedness and organizational skills could accomplish even when creativity failed. Cohen was even planning to use his night of Gusevian woe as a starting point for a long essay on the failings of Europe and, unavoidably, his father.

Satisfied of his subordinates’ entrepreneurial zeal, Vladimir allowed himself a month in the West with Morgan. The first week of March found them in Madrid running from club to club with a group of friendly Madrileños who chased after the night’s pleasure with the zest of Americans dashing after Pamplona bulls. Weeks two and three were spent in Paris, particularly at a mellow Marais boîte where some kind of fusion jazz was served up with a course of cheeses, and much champagne was consumed. By the fourth week Vladimir woke up at London’s Savoy Hotel, as if hoping that its proximity to the financial doings of London’s City would cure his hangover with a shot of Anglo mercantilism. Sobriety was desperately needed: Cohen had talked him into a trip to Auschwitz some thirty hours later. “For my essays,” he had said.

Vladimir spent the day in the bathtub, alternately soaking himself then getting up to shower. It was a beast to behold, this shower: four separate heads that attacked from all angles: a regular spray from on top, a drip by shoulder level, a fountain straight to the hip, and a risqué geyser that rammed into Vladimir’s genital area (to be used sparingly, that one). When he was dizzy from shower, Vladimir would sink back into the tub and thumb through the Herald Tribune, which thankfully had little to say that day, much like Vladimir himself.

With darkness only a few hours away, Vladimir dried his newly plump little body and started dressing for the evening. Morgan was still passed out, her behind lifting and falling slowly beneath the sheets in keeping with her subdued breath; she was dreaming perhaps of her terrorism or some long-dead family pet. After admiring this sight for a bit Vladimir gazed out the window where he could see a sliver of the Thames and a rain-soaked shoulder of St. James. Part of the view was taken up by a lonely skyscraper off in the distance, which, Vladimir had read in the hotel’s glossy literature, was a new development called Canary Wharf, billed as the tallest building in Europe. An architectural nostalgic, Vladimir recalled one of the last times he had spent with Baobab, sitting up on his friend’s roof, looking at the lone tower they were building across the East River in Queens.

He watched the Wharf for an indeterminate amount of time, letting himself be taken back to the days when Challah and Baobab could still count as the sum total of his affections; when through their failings he could draw comparative strength; when that childish feeling of superiority had been enough to sustain him. By the end of this reverie he found that his mobile had crawled into his hand. The dial tone hummed, indicating that the phone had been engaged.

He had forgotten Baobab’s number, although once it was etched into his memory along with his social security number—both were now casualty to the passage of time and the efficacy of Stolovan spirits. The only connection he was still capable of making across the Atlantic was to Westchester, and for that, too, the time had come.

Mother, woken up from her deep weekend slumber, could only conjure up her requisite “Bozhe moi!”

“Mother,” said Vladimir, amazed at how superfluous that word had become to his insane life, when only three years ago it had prefaced nearly every utterance.

“Vladimir, get out of Prava now!”

How did she know he had moved to Prava? “Pardon—”

“Your friend Baobab called. The Italian boy. I could not understand him, he is beyond understanding, but you are obviously in danger…” She paused to catch her breath. “Something about a fan, a man with a fan, he’s determined to murder you and Russians are involved. Your dimwitted friend has been trying to reach you frantically and so have I, but the operator in Prava knows nothing of you, as can be expected…”

“The man with the fan,” Vladimir said. He had wanted to say Fan Man, but it could not be said in Russian precisely that way. “Rybakov?”

“That is what I think he said. You must call him right now. Or better yet, get on the next plane out of Prava. You can even charge the ticket to my American Express account. It’s that important!”

“I’m not in Prava,” Vladimir said. “I’m in London.”

“London! Bozhe moi! Every Russian mafioso has a flat in London now. So it’s just like I suspected… Oh, Vladimir, please come back home, we won’t make you go to law school, I promise. You can live in the house and do whatever you want, I can get you a promotion at the resettlement agency, now that I’m on the board. And, this may come as a pleasant surprise, but we’ve put away a nice sum of money in the past ten years. We must have, I don’t know… Two, three, fourteen million dollars. We can afford to give you a little stipend, Vladimir. Maybe five thousand a year plus subway tokens. You can live at home and do whatever it is you young, listless people do. Smoke pot, paint, write, whatever they taught you at that fucking liberal arts school, devil confound all those hippies. Just please come back, Vladimir. They’ll kill you, those Russian animals! You’re such a weak, helpless boy, they’ll wrap you in a blin and have you for supper.”

“Okay, calm down, stop crying. Everything is fine. I’m safe in London.”

“I’m not crying,” Mother said. “I’m too agitated to cry!” But then she broke down and started weeping with such force that Vladimir put down the phone and turned to Morgan, her form stirring beneath the blankets in response to the loudness and urgency of his voice.

“I will call Baobab now,” he said quietly, “and if there’s truly danger, then I’ll be on the next plane to the States. I know what to do, Mother. I’m not stupid. I’ve become a very successful businessman in Prava. I was just about to send you a brochure of my new investment group.”

“A businessman without an M.B.A.,” sniffled Mother. “We all know what kind of businessman that is.”

“Did you hear what I said, Mother?”

“I hear you, Vladimir. You’ll call Baobab—”

“And I’m going to be perfectly safe. Forget about this being-eaten-in-a-blin business. Such nonsense! All right? I’m dialing Baobab now. Good-bye…”

“Vladimir!”

“What?”

“We still love you, Vladimir… And…”

“And?”

“…And your grandmother died two weeks ago.”

“Babushka?”

“Your father nearly had a nervous collapse between her death and your stupidity. He’s upstate right now, recovering with his fishing. The medical practice is losing money, but what can you do in such a situation? I had to let him go upstate.”

“My grandmother…” Vladimir said.

“…has left for the other world,” Mother completed. “They had her on the tubes for a few weeks, but then she died fast. Her face looked like she was in pain when she lapsed into a coma, but the doctors said that it didn’t necessarily mean she was suffering.”

Vladimir leaned himself against the cold window. Grandmother. Running after him with her fruit and farmer cheese at their old mountain dacha. “Volodechka! Essen!” That crazed, dear woman. To think that now the rectangle that had been his family had suddenly, with the subtraction of a single, flat EKG line, been reconfigured into a tiny triangle. To think there were only three Girshkins left. “The funeral?” Vladimir asked.

“Very nice, your father cried an ocean. Listen, Vladimir, get on the phone with Baobab already. Your grandmother was old, life for her was not life anymore, especially with you gone from it. Oh, how she loved you… So, just say a prayer for her soul, and for your father, too, and for my suffering heart, and for this whole wretched family of ours on which the Lord has chosen to heap only calamity these past two quarters… Now go!”

IT TOOK TWELVE rings but finally the tired, husky voice came on, sounding as unhappy as a government worker caught at his desk immediately after the five o’clock bell. “Baobab residence.”

“Is there a Baobab I could speak to?” Vladimir said. His friend’s demented greeting made him smile. Baobab remained Baobab.

“It’s you! Where are you? Never mind! Turn on CNN! Turn on CNN! It’s starting already! Jesus Christ!”

“What the hell are you yelling about? Why does it always have to be hysteria. Why can’t we have a normal—”

“That friend of yours with the fans, the one we had the citizenship for.”

“How now?”

“He barged into Challah’s, into your old apartment last week. He woke us up—”

“Us?”

Baobab sighed a long, pneumatic sigh. “After you left, Roberta married Laszlo,” he explained with aggravated patience. “They went to Utah to unionize the Mormons. So… I guess… Challah and I were both lonely…”

“That’s great!” Vladimir said. With all of his selfish little heart he wished them the best. Even the idea of them having sex, the tremor of their two large bodies shaking the already shaky foundations of Alphabet City, inspired in Vladimir only joy. Good for them! “But what did Rybakov want?”

“Dah! It’s starting! It’s starting! Turn it on! Turn it on!”

“What’s starting?”

“CNN, idiot!”

Vladimir tiptoed his way into the living room, where the enormous black monolith that was the television had already been set to the news channel. He could hear the newscaster even before the picture materialized, the words Breaking News—New York’s Mayoralty in Crisis floating along the bottom of the screen.

“… Aleksander Rybakov,” the newscaster was saying in midsentence. “But to most people, he is simply… The Fan Man.” The reporter was an unsmiling young woman in a provincial tweed suit, hair tied into a painful bun, teeth buffed into a reflective sheen. “We were first introduced to the Fan Man three months ago,” she continued, “when his many letters to the New York Times lambasting New York’s urban decay came to the attention of the city’s mayor.”

“Aaah!” Vladimir shouted. So he’d done it. He’d finally done it, that grizzly old loon.

Shot of a gilded banquet room, the mayor—a tall man with a square-set face that even two powerful jaws could not stretch into a smile—standing next to a hysterically grinning Rybakov, looking slim and polished in a three-piece banker’s suit. Above them a banner read: NEW YORK CELEBRATES THE NEWEST NEW YORKERS.

“SEE! SEE!” Baobab was shouting on the other end. “See what you put me through! I’m trying to take a nap when Rybakov and this crazy Serb knock down the door, and Rybakov’s screaming, ‘Girshkin! Girshkin! Liar! Thief!’ And he’s got the crutches just like on TV. And Challah was in the kitchen dialing 911. I mean, this Fan Man makes Jordi look perfectly reasonable. Hey, how’s it going with you, anyway?”

“Hm?”

“How’s it going?”

“Ah,” Vladimir said.

“Ah?”

“Ah,” Vladimir repeated. “No more. No more, Baobab.” He thought of Jordi. And Gusev. And the Groundhog. “Why fight it? No more.”

“Fight it? What are you talking about? You’re three thousand miles away. Everything’s roses. I just thought you should be warned. Just in case he decides to look for you in Prava.”

“Groundhog,” Vladimir whispered.

“What?

“His son.”

“What about him?”

“Nothing,” he said to Baobab. “Let it go.”

“If you’re trying to quote Paul McCartney, the correct wording is ‘Let It Be.’”

“I have to go,” Vladimir recovered. “Say good-bye to Challah.”

“Hey! I haven’t spoken to you in six months. Where are you going?”

“Concentration camp,” Vladimir said.

34. HOW GRANDMA SAVED THE GIRSHKINS

A CONVOY OF BMWs, Vladimir’s preferred method of traveling these days, pulled into the parking lot of Stadtkamp Auschwitz II–Birkenau. The lot was empty save for one tour bus, its tourists having long disembarked, its Polish driver idling away the time by lovingly cleaning his boots. Vladimir and Morgan had just flown in from London and Cohen had taken the train up from Prava. Cohen’s attempts to replace the BMWs with American autos had run into a snafu. PravaInvest’s jeeps were taking part in one of Gusev’s so-called readiness exercises, of which both NATO and the remains of the Warsaw Pact presumably were not informed. And so Vladimir and his friends were left to commute the three-kilometer distance between Auschwitz proper and its sister camp in the cars of the perpetrators.

They climbed the steps of the main lookout tower, beneath which ran the railroad tracks that kept the ovens supplied. This was the famous tower, a shot of which is requisite in any movie about the camps. For the sake of exaggerated scale, it would seem, many directors had shot the structure from the ground up. In truth, the tower was as squat and unimposing as a station house on the Metro-North railroad.

From the tower, however, the full extent of Birkenau was up for inspection. Rows upon rows of chimneys minus the buildings they were supposed to heat, stretched to the horizon like a collection of miniature factory stacks, bisected by the sandy path of the once busy railroad. The chimneys were all that remained after the retreating Germans, in their last public-relations gesture, dynamited the rest. But in some quadrants, rows of rectangular, ground-hugging barracks still stood, and it was easy to multiply them by the number of orphaned chimneys and in this manner to fill in the gaps of what used to be.

Cohen, consulting his well-worn guide to Europe’s concentration camps, traced his finger against the horizon, and said in an even tone, “There. The ponds of human ashes.” This was at the edge of the field of chimneys before a forest of naked trees began. Living figures could be seen trudging against the backdrop of the forest; perhaps this was the tour group whose bus was abandoned in the parking lot.

A lengthy cloud had passed—the late-winter sun redoubled its efforts, and Vladimir squinted, bringing his hand up to serve as a visor. “What are you thinking?” Cohen said, misinterpreting this gesture for a sign of trauma on Vladimir’s part.

“Vladimir’s tired,” Morgan said. She understood something was wrong, but wasn’t sure if Auschwitz alone was responsible. “You’ve been tired all day, haven’t you, Vladimir?”

“Yes, thank you,” Vladimir said, and almost bowed in gratitude for her intervention. The last thing he wanted to do was to speak to them. He wanted to be alone. He smiled and raised his finger as if to demonstrate initiative, then took the lead in descending the stairs and emerging into the forest of chimneys and surviving barracks.

Cohen and Morgan walked beside the railroad tracks, Cohen stopping every few meters to take a damning photograph. They ducked into the barracks periodically to see the blighted conditions of the camp inmates which, of course, left much to the imagination without the human element. They were on their way to the pit of human ashes lying at the end of the tracks. Vladimir walked alone, staying midway between the main lookout tower and the forest. This was where the ramp was supposed to be located, the ramp where arrivals were separated for death, either instantly by Zyklon B or protractedly by hard labor.

It was hard to recreate this part of the process, since only a narrow patch of dust ran off from the tracks to indicate that something had once been here. Across the tracks a sole structure stood—a rickety, wooden lookout post on a set of stilts, which reminded Vladimir of the house of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian fairy tales. Her house was supposed to be built on chicken legs that would take the Baba to wherever she felt havoc needed to be wreaked. The house could also act on its own accord, galloping through the village, trampling honest Christian folk at will.

Vladimir’s grandmother had fulfilled the duty of Russian grandmothers and told him Baba Yaga tales as an inducement for eating his farmer cheese, buckwheat kasha, and the other insipid delicacies of their country’s diet. But as these tales were frightening indeed, Grandma tempered the carnage with helpful disclaimers, such as “I hope you know that none of our relatives was ever killed by Baba Yaga!” Whether Grandma consciously understood the deeper significance of this disclaimer, Vladimir would never know. But it was true that practically his entire family escaped Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union. It was actually Grandma herself who was responsible for saving the Girshkins from Hitler, although homegrown Stalin proved beyond her capabilities.

Originally, the Girshkins were situated near the Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podolsk, a town whose Jews were all but wiped out in the early phases of Operation Barbarossa. The Girshkins, even then, were prosperous. They owned not one hotel but three, all catering to stagecoach travelers and thereby constituting perhaps one of the first known examples of the motel chain. Well, certainly in the Ukraine.

A practical clan, the Girshkins kept well abreast of the times. When the outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed a certainty, the family pooled all their gold, threw it into a wheelbarrow (which, to hear Grandma tell it, was practically full), then emptied the wheelbarrow into the local stream and resolutely trampled back home to eat up the last of their sturgeon and caviar. Having thus eluded any aspersions of being bourgeoisie, the Girshkins put their best proletarian foot forward, and this particular limb—like the lamb shank at Passover representing the strength of the Lord’s forearm—was embodied by Grandma.

Grandma joined the Red Pioneers, then the Komsomol Youth League, and finally the Party itself. There were pictures of her playing each of these venues with her eyes ablaze and mouth crinkled painfully into a smile, looking like a heroin addict granted her fix. Looking, in other words, like the paragon of Soviet agit-prop, especially with her pendulous peasant bosom and the broadest shoulders in her province, said shoulders kept aloft by a posture that, all by itself, had won her a prize in high school. And so, with these attributes in tow, Grandma left for Leningrad. She managed to get herself admitted to the infamous Institute of Pedagogy, where the most stalwart comrades were instructed in the science of indoctrinating the first generation of revolutionary toddlers.

After graduating the institute with top honors, Vladimir’s grandmother became a resounding success at an orphanage for emotionally disturbed children. While the frilly Petersburg women shunned the traditional disciplinary aspects of child-rearing, Grandma singlehandedly beat the crap out of hundreds of wayward young boys and girls, who in a matter of days were on their knees, singing “Lenin Lives on Forever.” This when they weren’t repolishing the balustrades, waxing the floors, or combing the neighborhood sidewalks for scrap metal, which Grandma convinced them would somehow be recycled into a tank they could all take for rides about town. Within a year, this no-nonsense approach, fresh from the cane-wielding, belt-swinging provinces, had yielded such spectacular results that nearly all the children were deemed no longer emotionally disturbed. Indeed, many of them achieved prominence in all walks of Soviet life, the majority with the military and security organs.

After her tenure at the orphanage, Grandma was given a cheap plastic medal and an entire grammar school to lord over. But the most enduring aspect of her success was her ability to get the Girshkins out of bleak, industrializing Kamenets-Podolsk and into a spacious clapboard house on the outskirts of Leningrad. This first move spared the family a confrontation with the SS and their cheerful Ukrainian cohorts, while Grandma’s second move, evacuation of the family before Leningrad fell under siege, saved the Girshkins from starvation and the shells of the Wehrmacht. How Grandma managed to pull the right strings and get all thirty Girshkins on the train to the Urals, where a partly-Jewish cousin, thrice removed, peacefully herded sheep in the shadows of an ore-smelting plant, was anyone’s guess. The old woman guarded the truth like an NKVD file, but it was no mystery, really. Anyone who could reform an entire orphanage, or, more significantly, push Vladimir’s dreamy and forgetful father through ten years of Soviet medical school (granted, it usually took five), could easily secure passage across the choked rail arteries of wartime Russia.

AND THAT, THOUGHT Vladimir, was the woman who had kept his family out of Stadtkamp Auschwitz II–Birkenau. If he possessed even the trace of doubt of an agnostic, now would be the time to mumble what he remembered of the Mourner’s Kaddish. But with Hebrew school resolving the last enigmas of the empty heavens above, Vladimir could only smile and remember the feisty Grandma he once knew as a child.

He looked down the tracks where Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen’s visit. By this time the tour group had reached the tracks and started toward them at a leisurely pace—perhaps the pond of human ashes had had a debilitating effect and the worldly tour group was beating it back to the barracks.

Perhaps he was being judgmental.

Oh, it was high time to get out of here! Every thought inappropriate, every gesture a heresy. Enough! Look how his grandmother had escaped the gas and the bombs, investing body and soul in the Soviet system that ultimately took as many lives as the Teutonic evil streaming through the borders in columns of panzer and precision-strafing from above. Her lesson to Vladimir was as clear as it should have been for his fellow Jews interned in the pond of ashes down the track: Get out while you can and by any means necessary. Run, before the goyim get you, and get you they will, no matter how many laps you cover with Kostya and how much they claim to love you while the absinthe flows.

Vladimir turned to the main lookout tower, the direction from which the trains came with so much of their human freight already perished, from Bucharest and Budapest, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Warsaw and Cracow, Bratislava and… could it be?… Prava. His golden Prava. The city that had treated his ailing ego as kindly as the springs of Karlsbad once treated gout. Get out! But how? And to what salvation? He thought of Grandma, forty years after Stalin died, huddled over volume seven of the Social Security Regulations with sleepless eyes, her magnifying glass at the ready, trying to figure out the meaning of “residual functional capacity.”

Oh, to hell with this twentieth century that was almost at an end, with all its problems still intact and flourishing, and the Girshkins, once again, the brunt of the joke, the epicenter of the storm, the clearinghouse for global confusion and uncertainty. To hell with… Vladimir heard the singular sound of a zoom lens extending behind him and then the snap of a shutter. He turned. Behind him the tour group was paces away. A ruddy-cheeked middle-aged woman, as tall, thin, and neatly groomed as the poplars that surrounded Birkenau, was scrambling to deposit her camera into her crowded handbag, her eyes darting everywhere except in the direction of Vladimir. She had taken a picture of him!

The rest of the Germans also skirted the ground with their light-hued eyes, some glancing back at the offending photographer with likely malice. Amazingly, most of them looked to be in their seventies—large and healthy, with becoming wrinkles and just the perfect white cardigan sweaters for an informal afternoon—that is to say, they were old enough to have been in Birkenau in a different capacity some half a century ago. Should Vladimir, then, have spread out his chest, raised his head high to show off his dark Semitic curls, and then have said to them with a sardonic smile, “Cheese?”

No, leave such gestures to the Israelis. Our Vladimir could only smile shyly as the Germans approached, his shoulders hunched forward submissively, the way his parents had once approached the sour-pussed immigration officials at JFK.

Their tour guide was a handsome young man not much older than Vladimir although certainly younger-looking. He wore his thick hair long, and the granny-glasses lost amid his square, salubrious face likely contained plain, noncurative glass. There were pockets of loose flesh around his still-muscular chest and belly, giving the impression of a strapping country youth idled by a string of poor harvests. That was, in fact, the impression he gave Vladimir: a sensitive provincial man who had learned of liberalism and the German debt from a galvanic local teacher, a hippie from the time when hippies held sway over the land, and now he had himself joined the progressive ranks and took the blighted older generations to see the handiwork of their times. What a concept, thought Vladimir, neither impressed nor appalled.

His eyes met those of the tour guide who smiled and nodded as if this meeting had been prearranged. “Hi,” he said to Vladimir, his voice trembling even for the duration of that minuscule syllable.

“Hello,” Vladimir said. He brought up his hand in a formal gesture of greeting. He tried to recall instantly what it meant to look “grave,” but knew he couldn’t pull it off on the spot, not with the tumult of the past few days under his belt. He continued with his shit-eating grin.

“Hello,” answered the tour guide as he filed past Vladimir. His elderly charges followed. With the ice seemingly broken by their leader, they were now able to look Vladimir briefly in the eye and even manage a little sympathetic smile. Only the middle-aged woman, the one who had dared to photograph Vladimir, the Live Jew of Birkenau, had increased her pace while staring resolutely ahead.

Thank you, come again, Vladimir thought to say, but instead he sighed, looked once more at the departing mane of the thoughtful young tour guide—his better in every aspect, despite the rotting branches of the German’s family tree—and considered yet again his own relative loss of place in this world; his irrevocable perdition.

Ah, and where now, Vladimir Borisovich?

He began his long, pensive trudge to the pond of human ashes, where his friends were already waiting for him, Cohen aghast by both the tour group and the ashes, Morgan solely by the ashes. Perhaps she could get Tomaš and Alpha to blow up the remains of Birkenau as well. Just a few more kilos of C4 and they could really take care of history.

And then his mobile phone rang.

“Well, well,” said the Groundhog.

“Please don’t kill me,” Vladimir blurted out.

“Kill you?” The Groundhog laughed. “Kill my clever goose? Oh, please, friend. We all knew what kind of character you were from the start. Anyone who can bamboozle half of America can surely fuck over my old man.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Vladimir whimpered. “I love your father. I love—”

“Okay, can you please shut up,” the Groundhog moaned. “All is forgiven, just stop crying. Now, I need you back in Prava. We’ve got a strange new scheme going here.”

“Scheme,” Vladimir mumbled. What the hell was going on in the Hog’s little mind? “A strange new scheme…”

“Strange precisely because it isn’t a scheme. A legitimate venture,” the Groundhog explained. “A brewery in South Stolovaya that looks ready to expand into West European and American markets.”

“Legitimate venture,” Vladimir repeated. His mind was barely functioning. “Did Kostya advise you of this?”

“No, no, it’s all me,” the Groundhog said. “And you can’t let anyone know about this, not even Kostya. Especially about the fact that it’s aboveboard. I don’t want to be a laughingstock.” He then invited Vladimir to come out the following week and look over the brewery. “Without your professional opinion no venture can be consummated,” he said. “Legitimate or otherwise.”

“I will never betray you again,” Vladimir whispered.

The Groundhog laughed once more, a soft chortle far removed from his usual boisterous braying. Then he hung up.